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- [00:01]
Galen
Hey there, listeners. Today's podcast is the audio from a Substack live that I hosted with Nate earlier in the day on Thursday. So paid subscribers will be able to listen to the full audio here. They will also be able to watch the video@gdpolitics.com Otherwise, there's a preview, and folks can go to gdpolitics.com to either get the full audio or the full video. We talked about lots of the messy politics of the day, including the immigration raids in Los Angeles, the responding protests, and Trump's escalation in terms of sending in the National Guard and Marines. We also talked about New York City's mayoral primary. I know folks have been sending in questions about that. We also talked about Elon Musk's threat of a third party. Nate is a little more credulous than many analysts that there is an opening for a third party challenger. We talked about what that might look like and maybe what even kind of game show could produce such a candidate. And at the very, very end, we talked a little bit about artificial intelligence. Anyway, here it is.
- [01:04]
Nate
All right, Nate. And we're live. How's it going?
- [01:08]
Nate Silver
Hey, Galen, how are you?
- [01:09]
Nate
I'm good. You know, it's a beautiful day in sunny New York. How are you in Las Vegas, and have you made any money yet?
- [01:18]
Nate Silver
I played four events and cashed one, which is kind of about average. Poker's a frustrating game, tournament poker in particular, where about 15% of players cash in a given tournament, meaning make more than $0. Right. So it's kind of far for the course. I'm happy with how I'm playing, trying to do real work in the morning, you know, you wake up and you're like, oh, I got up at 7:30 today. Right. I bet it's. I bet it's, you know, still cool. Enough desert air to do a run, and it's like 6 million degrees already at like 7am so the weather is nice in the sense of being clear. But yeah, Vegas in the summer is, you know, limits your outdoor activity, I would say.
- [02:00]
Nate
Yeah, I have a little bit of an advantage over you. I'm three hours ahead, so I'm well into my day. How long does the World Series of Poker last? Like, how long are you taking up residency in Las Vegas and when is there going to be a Nate Silver residency at the Bellagio?
- [02:18]
Nate Silver
You know, my. I'm here for about a month, which is in some sense a ridiculous amount of time. The World Series lasts like seven weeks, so I'm here for almost half of it. More than half of it, I guess.
- [02:29]
Unnamed Analyst
Right.
- [02:29]
Nate Silver
Which is kind of a ridiculous thing to do in some ways. I respond to that by being like, I'm gonna actually kind of take this, bring more presence to the poker table. I know that sounds dumb. This is not a poker podcast. We have a lot of politics to talk about. But, like, you know, I'm kind of, if you're doing something, do it seriously. And so, you know, these are long days. I, like, have days where I'm working five hours, work out for an hour, and then play poker for 10 hours. Right. And like, it's not.
- [02:52]
Unnamed Analyst
I'm.
- [02:53]
Nate Silver
I oddly party less in Vegas than I do in almost any other place.
- [02:58]
Nate
Life was hard for Nate Silver in Las Vegas.
- [03:00]
Nate Silver
Okay, Galen, enough, enough. We have serious stuff to talk about.
- [03:03]
Nate
Okay, let's talk about it. So the starting point for this conversation, a while ago, we thought we might talk about the New York City mayoral race, which we will get into, because I think there's quite a points of appetite. But even yesterday when we were planning what we were talking about, you were like, well, we should probably bring up the fact that Trump is getting more popular because his approval rating has been on the incline in over the past month or so after it bottomed out around the 100 day period, post liberation Day, when the stock market was somewhat in free fall. But even today, it seems like that narrative is less clear. It is pretty clear that he has improved his approval rating over the past month, but it looks like it might be declining again. I have some more questions and thoughts on that, but can you weigh out your thinking in terms of how Americans are reacting to the President in this moment?
- [03:59]
Nate Silver
Look, I think the basic trajectory of Trump's approval rating is that it's all about the economy and people's, I think, correct perceptions that tariffs could cause inflation and other harm to the economy. And apart from that, these news stories, some of which I think are quite important, I'm not sure that I 100% align with what stories I think are important versus what stories the media thinks are important or that get most oxygen. But, yeah, basically Trump threatened to implement a bunch of tariffs. His approval rating went very far down, very fast. It affected the stock market, affected bond prices and so forth. And then he's pulled back from most of that and. Or had it blocked, intervened by courts and. Yeah, I don't know. I do think that, like, I guess we're getting right into the heart of this. Right. I do think that, like, people who follow politics every day, and that includes both political Partisans, and more importantly, in some ways the media, right. Don't understand how the average voter sees things, right. The average voter was talking about tariffs. Like, I would just have random conversations with people about like, tariffs because people are like, it's going to ruin the whole fucking economy and, or we're going to have like really high price of goods or I change my planning. Right. I don't think the ICE raids and the protests, whatever you want to call it in LA is reaching that degree of penetration. And so I think people are mostly looking at, looking at noise, Right? And I think people, some analysts live under a delusion that people are tracking every twist and turn of the news cycle, right? Because they write a substack every day or they do a video every day, right? And like, and that's like, people need time to determine what's important. And clearly terrorists, not that threshold. And I think everything else is somewhat baked in.
- [05:47]
Nate
Can I ask you a clarifying question about Trump's popularity? So if you look at Trump's approval, according to the New York Times, according to the Silver Bulletin, I and according to Real Clear Politics, there's some differentiation. So today, according to the New York Times, he's at net negative 8. According to Silver Bulletin, he's at net negative 5 and a half. And according to Real Clear Politics, he's at net negative 3. I actually had Ruth and Yelnick, who's the survey editor at the New York Times, on the GD Politics podcast recently, which, by the way, subscribe to the GD Politics podcast wherever you get your podcast or on Substock itself. But she said, you know, we haven't had a lot of high quality surveys in recently. And part of the reason that the New York Times shows worse numbers for Trump than maybe, for example, the Silver Bulletin is there's just more weight on those high quality surveys and that a lot of the surveys that had shown Trump improving over the past month were lower quality stuff. Do you agree with that at all? Do you think that it's clear that Trump had been on the upswing or was there not enough good quality survey.
- [06:55]
Nate Silver
Data to say he absolutely was on the upswing? And if you don't have an average that reflects that, then go back to the lab and improve that average. I mean, you know, in our numbers, he went from like a minus 10 to like a minus four and now down to minus five.
- [07:09]
Unnamed Analyst
Right.
- [07:10]
Nate Silver
That's way outside the range of both fiscal error and kind of methodological differences. Right. And we account for things like house effects and we give weight to different surveys. I mean, also keep in mind that like.
- [07:21]
Nate
And that people. Is that because of the improving economy? Like I say economy in quotation marks because I'm talking about the stock market sort of returning to where it was or even breaking records, you know, positive information, data coming out about the inflation rate, things like that. Obviously you're talking about the average voter. They're not looking at the Bureau of Labor Statistics data that comes out every month or whatnot. But what do you ascribe that increase in popularity to?
- [07:48]
Nate Silver
Yeah, the economy. I mean, I think, I think it's the economy and the fact that other things have trouble breaking through, including, again, very important things in this environment. I mean, if you look at, we have also on the how popular is Donald Trump? Page, issue by issue, approval ratings, you know, they can be a little bit bouncier. Not every pollster asks about every interviewer, but you saw a big decline and then a modest improvement on trade. You saw a big decline and then steadying out on economy, inflation, immigration. Now, some of the recent surveys have shown a big decline in immigration. Maybe it's a response to LA or whatever else. Right. That series has been a little bit bouncier, but like, but again, I just can't. I'm sounding redundant, but like the Trump's Achilles heel is if he tanks or if the economy tanks. I guess I'll be careful and use the passive voice. Although obviously I think tariffs do the potential to like, actually cause significant damage to the economy.
- [08:41]
Nate
Okay, well, since we don't want you to sound repetitive, let's talk about immigration and what's happening in L. A. It sounds like you already started to respond to some of what's out in the ether, but stake something in the ground and not react.
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Nate Silver
Look, I think what LA happening in LA is actually pretty bad, right? Because I think it's, it's escalatory on the part of the administration and it's disproportionate.
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Unnamed Analyst
Right.
- [09:09]
Nate Silver
You know, I think if you told me, you know, I kind of put myself out there and said, yeah, this A.O. garcia thing, he shouldn't have been deported.
- [09:15]
Unnamed Analyst
Right?
- [09:15]
Nate Silver
But like, you know, I thought that was not as bad as the escalatory potential of like, sending, you know, U.S. troops into L. A And of course part of it is that, like, you're going to have idiots respond in stupid ways. Right? But it doesn't seem to me, and look, I'm someone who thought that, like, the way the media covered like the George Floyd protests, which were sometimes violent, right, Was, was A little biased, Right. You know, I have been not pouring through reports, right? But looking at reports with a cynical eye and saying, is this worse on the ground than you might pick up from reading the New York Times or something? And I don't. I don't know.
- [09:52]
Unnamed Analyst
Right.
- [09:52]
Nate Silver
It seems like it's pretty isolated. It seems like there are bad actors, but, like, it's not on the scale of other civil unrest that we've seen in L. A or other cities. And like. And that Trump is escalating and trying to light a match to the situation. So I do think that's. That's pretty bad.
- [10:07]
Unnamed Analyst
Right.
- [10:07]
Nate Silver
I also think that, like, the average American is not particularly paying attention to this story.
- [10:14]
Unnamed Analyst
Right.
- [10:16]
Nate Silver
You know, I mean, people are in their. In their lives and their bubbles and they're exhausted by news media or by partisans who constantly say, this is the crisis moment. Right? This is the crisis. Maybe I'm stealing a future column, you know, Are you familiar with the term the shepherd tone? You know what a shepherd tone is?
- [10:36]
Nate
No, but please educate me.
- [10:38]
Nate Silver
So shepherd tone, it's like the barber pole effect. It's a series of sine waves where the noise always appears to be getting higher pitched and louder.
- [10:47]
Unnamed Analyst
Right.
- [10:48]
Nate Silver
Even though it's actually just on a loop. So it seems like things are always rising, but they're not.
- [10:52]
Unnamed Analyst
Right?
- [10:52]
Nate Silver
And like, and I feel like that's what America's kind of become right, Is like every moment is framed as a moment of crisis. And then what happens is that Taco Trump actually often does back down or chicken out. I mean, he returned Abreu Garcia eventually too late to the United States.
- [11:08]
Unnamed Analyst
Right?
- [11:09]
Nate Silver
And then, and then people pick up something new and it kind like serves this mutual co interest where, like, Trump is always getting attention, always making it hard to know what you're supposed to react to.
- [11:19]
Unnamed Analyst
Right?
- [11:20]
Nate Silver
You know, the media always something to cover. Content creators always have something to cover, right? And like, and it makes people diswant if you're like, well, no, it makes people disoriented. Like, okay, so I think that maybe, you know, for example, what RFK Jr. Is doing on, you know, firing the vaccine board or cutting out funding for science or I think those things might be, maybe the budget bill, you know, might be worse than the things that get the most media attention. And there's like a big fight, you know, you know, the dueling blog post, you know, subsects, you know, Matt Aglaces like immigration is a distraction from the big bad budget bill, whatever the fuck it's called, Right? And Paul Krugman's like, well, no other way around, right? This is the real, this is democracy on the line. And like, people have heard that message so often over the past or the five years that Trump's been in office, in the four years of Biden, right? That like, that they're going to kind of like tune it out. And that puts Democrats in a difficult position when Trump is doing things that are pretty bad.
- [12:16]
Unnamed Analyst
Right.
- [12:18]
Nate
I think we should be clear here, though, that immigration is something that Americans care about. So in the most recent Gallup polling, it was third in terms of the most important problems facing the country. It's declined a little bit from the heights of late 2023 and early 2024, but it is still the third most important issue to Americans. And, you know, some of this is getting, a lot of this in the partisan press is getting sorted through, you know, what's good for Republicans, what's good for Democrats. Does Trump seem strong? Do our Democrats sort of fighting back on immigration? And I think the reality is that Democrats start from a real significant deficit of trust amongst the American public because of what Biden's four years look like on the issue of immigration. You know, I was looking at some of those recent CBS YouGov polling. In that poll, Trump's approval rating is net negative 10amongst the American public. Right. So this is not a group of people that they're surveying that is particularly sympathetic to him. When asked, which party do you trust more to handle each of the following issues on immigration, the majority of people trust the Republican Party and they have an advantage of 6 percentage points on the issue.
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Unnamed Analyst
Right.
- [13:34]
Nate
So Democrats, it's hard to feel sympathetic for Democrats a little bit in this moment on immigration because in some ways they are reaping what they showed during the Biden administration. Like if you just look at the actual numbers on encounters at the southern border, for example, Right. During Obama's presidency, during Trump's first term, encounters at the southern border rarely breached 50,000 in a month. During Biden's administration, it exceeded 150,000 monthly and eventually reached a record breaking number of about 300,000 in December of 2023. And Democrats did basically nothing. I mean, they started talking about in an election year doing something. We all kind of know that it's very hard to actually pass legislation in an election year. And then eventually in the spring of 2024, Biden proved that all along he could have done something by actually taking executive action. And now Trump has sort of, you know, addressed the issue at the Southern Border, again, without passing legislation, but by enforcing the law. And so I think a lot of Americans, while they might not like what they see in terms of raids at a Home Depot or the likes, they aren't necessarily going to trust Democrats when they open their mouths on the issue of immigration because of the hole that they dug themselves into over the past four years.
- [14:51]
Nate Silver
Yeah, look, and there is also demonization of immigration, to be sure, but like, yeah, I mean, you know, Democrats acted like there were no political consequences for what they did, particularly in the early days of Biden's White House, where a lot of policies were enforced less or liberalized or whatever else. I mean, look, what I would have said is that people do go based on kind of big picture vibes. Like, one genre I really think misleads people is like, when you're like, well, if you kind of survey this and that particular question and then the YouTube survey says this and that, like, I don't know, I think it's kind of bullshit. I think it's not how public opinion works. I think people work based on vibes and priors, to use kind of the nerdy term of that.
- [15:32]
Unnamed Analyst
Right.
- [15:33]
Nate Silver
And they're not like, picking through the details of stories, especially if they don't necessarily trust, trust the media's coverage of an issue like immigration to have all that much, like, precision, basically. I mean, look, I will say, like, in these surveys recently, his numbers on immigration are back, are back down again. But, you know, look, you know, all this kind of feels like it's in the same key, right? People don't kind of, there's not that much that, like, kind of breaks through the noise, including things that are really bad and like, and like, that's a disadvantage that Democrats have, right? I mean, I, I, I, I, you know, I, I heard Gavin Newsom on that.
- [16:18]
Nate
What are you talking about specifically?
- [16:19]
Nate Silver
Meaning to some extent, when Trump is the president, that he sets the agenda, there are a lot of things he can do that demand news coverage. I think obviously, LA is something that demands a lot of news coverage.
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Unnamed Analyst
Right.
- [16:31]
Nate Silver
But there are a lot of things he could do, like dictate the pace and the tempo.
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Unnamed Analyst
Right?
- [16:36]
Nate Silver
And like, Democrats had this thing where, like, they were, like, had taco trucks the other week for taco. Trump always chickens out, Right. I had a version that was like, torta. Like, Trump often regrets tanking approval, right. Where he does react to public opinion. He does react to public opinion and he does back off when he encounters a certain sort of politically disadvantaged resistance. Right. But, like, you know, his chance to kind of constantly put out shiny objects of which some of which actually are poisonous and quite bad and some which are just shiny objects and trolling stupid stuff and like, and there's not like a lot of ability to like, distinguish between them. So like, so maybe the la. I mean, again, I think it's quite escalatory and, and dangerous. I mean, if you're, if you've been through five years of Trump or four and a half years, kind of the first term, then like you kind of learn the heuristic that voters internalize that like, okay, things usually do de, escalate and then maybe sometimes it won't. It didn't on January 6th, for example.
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Unnamed Analyst
Right.
- [17:31]
Nate Silver
You know, maybe this will be an escalation and things get worse and worse. But like, I just think people have to be careful when you have people say things like this is a dress rehearsal for like, for like mass vote suppression. The 2026, 2028 election. Okay, maybe there's some chance of that. You want to lay odds, right? You're writing in your newsletter like it's 100%. Oh, you want to actually bet on that? You know what I mean? Like, because like, people. Because that type of like, rhetoric is damaging when the predictions don't come true after four and a half years. People, a variety of news consumers. It's a bit of a midwit thing, right? The people who don't watch the news at all are like, okay, the press is always saying the sky is falling. People who really follow us are like, okay, we actually have to be more discerning because somet the sky is falling and sometimes it isn't.
- [18:09]
Unnamed Analyst
Right?
- [18:09]
Nate Silver
But like, but like, I don't know. I think that, that it's hard to distinguish single signal from noise.
- [18:17]
Nate
Yeah. Well, I mean one of the people who's out there saying that this is akin to the start of authoritarianism and obviously California has sued and we will find out how the courts rule. But this is not, I don't think, as cut and dry as January 6th. I don't think that's a controversial thing to say. But Gavin Newsom has been out there saying that this is the start of authoritarianism. I think he sees this as his entree to becoming the leader of the opposition. Democrats have felt adrift looking for somebody to help channel their frustration and anger. The last time we gathered on some stack Liveney, we did a Democratic primary draft for 2028. I think it got, it got a little more attention than we expected. We somehow ended up on the homepage of the New York Post and running clips on Fox News and MSNBC the following weekend. Because we said that we thought AOC was the likeliest Democratic nominee in 2028. I want to underline likeliest, which does not mean guaranteed, does not mean that you would even take her over the field, et cetera, et cetera. But in that draft, we chose Gavin Newsom 6 so he was your third pick. He was the sixth overall pick. Do the events of the past weekend plus change your thinking at all about the politics or Gavin Newsom's career?
- [19:48]
Nate Silver
So if you look at prediction markets, Gavin has not.
- [19:52]
Galen
And that's the end of the preview. If you want to catch more, go to gdpolitics. Com. Otherwise, I will see you very soon.
- [20:00]
Nate
Thanks for listening.