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- [00:00]
A
How was your flight back? Did you have any incidents?
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B
No.
- [00:04]
A
Okay, good.
- [00:05]
B
It was delightful. So the Denver airport is not haunted? It was fine.
- [00:09]
A
The secret. The Society airport.
- [00:11]
B
Yeah, it's on, like, the literal, like, visit Denver official page. All of this, like, conspiracy theories about the airport being haunted.
- [00:31]
C
Hello, and welcome to the GD Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Darouc. As I was sorting through polls last Friday, preparing for Monday morning's recording, I started to think to myself, Trump's approval is looking bad, like a new level of bad. It's probably time to talk about it. Across all the averages, Trump seemed to be nearing or at the worst number of his second term. And like clockwork, in case we needed any further confirmation, Monday morning, the New York Times released its latest Trump approval polling. The headline, Just 37% of Americans approve of his performance as president. His lowest approval rating in any time. See on a survey in either term. Nate Cohn goes on to write, while recent presidencies have often been unpopular and polarizing, no president's approval rating has been under 38% in the average for more than a few days in the last 617 years. So today we're going to talk about that and a whole lot more. Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy lost his primary on Saturday after Trump endorsed against him. With Cassidy's departure, only three of the 17 Republicans who backed Trump's second impeachment might remain after 2026, and two of them, Susan Collins and David Valadao, are fighting for their political lives. Lisa Murkowski, shout out to you will also preview Tuesday night's primaries in Georgia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania. In Georgia, Republicans are choosing a rival for Senator John Ossoff, and both parties are choosing a candidate for governor in Kentucky. It's another test of Trump loyalty within the gop. And finally, for the wonks, we've got a dispatch from this year's big polling conference. Joining me after attending that conference last week is Mary Radcliffe, head of research at 50 plus one. Welcome, Mary.
- [02:11]
B
Thanks, Galen. Great to be here.
- [02:13]
C
Great to have you. And also here with us, Nathaniel Rakic, who is still recovering from a red eye he took back from that conference in LA last night. Managing editor at votebeat. Nathaniel, welcome.
- [02:24]
A
Hey, guys. Yes, I am literally two hours fresh from coming off my flight back from la, so I'm. I'm doing great. This is going to be a real interesting podcast.
- [02:33]
C
It's going to have some very spicy takes for us, I'm sure. Let's dive right in. Mary, Queen of polling, what's the story behind Trump's new record low.
- [02:44]
B
I think this answer won't be surprising to most people. The story is inflation and cost of living. If you look at Trump's approval on individual issues, not the overall top line, but on individual issues, his approval on inflation and cost of living has absolutely crashed, especially since the recent conflict in Iran began. I think that's really what's driving all of this bad news for the president. You know, it's interesting, I was also interested in that Nate Cohn piece that you referenced, Galen. He said no president has been at an approval rating of 38 or below for more than a few days in the Times polling average. And currently Trump has been at 38 in the times polling average for I think it was 10 days. So that's perhaps a record since the Obama era, which is as far back as Nate Cohn was doing this analysis. What will be particularly interesting over the coming months is to see if he can break that floor. You know, that has been the floor. If he goes down below that, we're sort of in uncharted territory. Uh, so yeah, this is, it's not a great moment to be Donald Trump, I think.
- [03:51]
A
I think it's particularly interesting. So it's also the worst approval rating that any president has had at this point in their term, basically, as far as we have had approval rating polling. So just as we had at 5:38 at Silver Bulletin, you can go back and look at kind of like retroactive averages. Basically what the Silver Bulletin averages would have been if, you know, Silver Bulletin had existed when Dwight Eisenhower was president and no other president has been, has been this far down this quickly. And I do think it's interesting, the 17 year stat, because I think there's been this assumption for a while that we're in such a polarized time that approval ratings are going to be, are going to exist within a narrow band and that like Trump has this floor, but he keeps kind of like inching lower and lower. And you know, the last time that a president had an approval rating lower than this was George W. Bush in the last couple years of his term when, you know, things were going really badly for him. You had, you know, Katrina and the economic crisis and things like that, and he was down in the 20s for his approval rating. And I, I would assume that that is unreachable in this day and age just because Republicans and Trump specifically have a base of support that will always say that they approve of him. And to be clear, he's a long way away from hitting the 20s. But you know, he's gotten lower than I would have thought possible before. And, and obviously all of this, you know, they're, they're the relationship between midterm losses and a president's approval ra. But it does exist. And so it obviously raises questions about, you know, how badly Republicans are going to blow it in the midterms. The Times Siena poll that you mentioned, Galen, had Democrats up by 10 points on the generic ballot. It's obviously very. It was actually 10 when you round.
- [05:35]
B
Oh, okay.
- [05:36]
C
Ooh, okay. That's the spicy Nathaniel I was talking about.
- [05:41]
B
Well, to be fair, I was reading the crosstab and they don't have the, the unrounded figures in their cross tab.
- [05:47]
A
That's totally fair. I don't dumpster dive. Sorry, I don't cross tab dive or dumpster dive. Hopefully there were, there were little tags. There were little tags at a poor that you could attach to your name badge that said I just here for the cross tabs. Mary got that one and I did not.
- [06:04]
C
So anyway, I want to ask a question before we dig too deep into the repercussions of this, about the nature of Trump's approval rating in this moment. So just by the way, because I oftentimes cite the net approval rating, if you look at Silver bulletin, Trump is 20 points underwater. If you look at the New York Times, 22 points underwater, 50 plus 1, 23 points underwater. I'm going to start a GD average that averages all of the averages. And then you, and then you can just go there, folks. But I, after the New York Times poll came out, I tweeted and substacked and whatever. An image of the Silver Bulletin net approval rating going down to negative 20. And somebody commented on it. A really interesting comment and I want to get your take. Charles writes, on the one hand, you could look at this and say the Iran debacle doesn't actually seem to matter that much. It's certainly not like there's a noticeable change in the trajectory. It's just a long, steady decline. And in fact, that is how it looks. He goes from plus 10 to negative 20. And there's a steady decline across the almost year and a half now that he's been in office. Charles goes on to write, on the other hand, maybe the consistent rake stepping in a variety of fields is the story here. If you keep making terrible unpopular choices, your downward trajectory will continue. That is, the consistent decline is an illusion. In fact, there's an expected equilibrium which keeps being disrupted by new choices. Charles writes, I think the second theory is probably closer to the truth. In his first term, he was often able to keep his floor by simply going dark on the policy front for a while. This time around, they're far more active and mostly that activity seems to be extremely unpopular with the war and tariffs being the most obvious examples. There's even a third angle which is that the floor of about 40% was a real thing, and that even with all the other unpopular stuff, he probably would have stabilized there. But the Iran war is such a drag that he's finally broken that floor. What do you guys think about Charles argument? Sort of the steady decline that looks almost preordained when you look at it on a chart versus the rake stepping or, you know, Trump getting in his own way with poor decisions that are unpopular with the American public.
- [08:19]
B
I mean, I think there's probably some validity there. A few weeks ago, our friend Elliot Morris at Strength in Numbers did an analysis of, like, the change points in Donald Trump's approval rating so far in this term, which I thought was actually quite interesting. He used some statistical tools to identify the, the moments that seemed to make an impact. And what's, what's interesting about Trump's approval rating when you look at it from that perspective, is you do see these breakpoints where you see like a change begin to happen. The thing that's different this time around compared to the first term is after each of these moments, there has been essentially no recovery for Donald Trump. He's never picked back up support once he's lost it. That seems to be what's different, and maybe that is this continued rake stepping that he hasn't done things that would bring people back, back into his camp after he's lost them. So they just keep drifting away and not returning. I think that's probably part of the story, and I think that the continued rake stepping is probably like impacting that in a, in a significant way.
- [09:23]
A
Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think that you have to think about the counterfactual, which is, I do think there is probably a floor somewhere or like, you know, an equilibrium to be made. And maybe without the Iran war, you know, we would be kind of like flatlining at, by this point in his term and instead it just continues. So I do tend to agree with the interpretation that it's just an illusion. I think for further evidence of this, you can look at that approval rating by issue that Mary mentioned, and you really do see a steep decline in the cost of living slash inflation approval rating around when the war started. And the, his approval Rating on other issues has kind of like ticked lower, but it hasn't been super pronounced.
- [10:05]
B
Yeah, that's absolutely right. I'm looking at it right now. And before the Iran war, he was underwater on inflation by around, you know, mid-20s, like 25, 26 points. In just that two month period that we have been involved in Iran, it's crashed down to underwater by 40 points. So that's a, that's a big movement and you don't see that in the other issues we're tracking.
- [10:26]
C
That's where I take issue with Charles's analysis a bit, which is I don't think it was the fact that Trump went dark every so often and returned to an equilibrium in his first term. I think it's the fact that a strong economy buoyed him no matter what other maybe socially or logistically unpopular things he did. And here I'm going to say there's been a lot of new polling coming out recently. And so here I'm going to CITE1 from CNN that was conducted by SSRS. They found that 77%, including a majority of Republicans, say that Trump's policies have increased the cost of living in their own community. Roughly 2/3 of Americans say that Trump's policies have worsened economic conditions in the country. And Trump's approval rating stands at 3, 30% on the economy, a career low. So I think the economy is a major story here. Interestingly enough, I do want to point out that when you ask Americans which party do you prefer on the economy, Republicans or Democrats, it's about even. Whereas during this point in Biden's term, when inflation was taking root, Americans significantly preferred Republicans on the economy and that gap widened. Up until the 2024 election, Republicans had a double digit advantage on the issue of the economy. So it is interesting that although Americans have deeply soured on Trump when it comes to the economy and cost of living, there hasn't been a proportional warming towards Democrats on the issue.
- [11:55]
A
Yeah, no, that's definitely true. I think that, you know, memories of Joe Biden and inflation under him are still very fresh. I think, you know, we know that the Democratic Party brand is not popular. We saw that in the Times Sienna poll as well. They didn't. You know, even though Democrats had that big lead in the generic ballot, the kind of the, just like, you know, do you view the democr Democratic Party favorably questioned was still quite bad for them. I am kind of like, you know, I'll float my little like hot take du jour and say that like all smart analysts, I am skeptical of third party bids and everything like that. But I will say if you were to see a Ross Perot type of candidacy emerge, I feel like it would be a situation like this because you do have this very fresh memory of both Democrats and Republican presidents failing on this issue. That is very important to Americans. And there's clearly a lot of discontent out there. And like, yeah, I mean a negative 20 number is not something that you see every day or any at all in the last 17 years.
- [12:49]
B
Yeah. The other thing I would add is that we are in a midterm cycle, not a presidential cycle, which means and because the Democrats lost the White House in 2024, there is no real standard bearer for the Democratic Party. And that means there is no is not necessarily a consistent top line message on what the Democratic plan for the economy is. You have individual politicians proposing their individual plans, but there's no like, here's the big picture of what Democrats to do on the economy. So I think that also makes it a challenging environment for Democrats to pick up support on this issue just because there's no like unified theory of the case. I think, you know, we've, we've talked before about Democratic strategy for the midterms and it does not seem like they're doing the like 6 for 26 type of thing like they did in 2006 where there's a clear across the board message. So I mean like I hear individual politicians proposing various tax cuts and for middle class and tax increases for corporations or whatever, but like there's no one thing.
- [13:51]
C
Yeah, I'm going to sort of split the baby here and say that I agree with both of you. I think there are longer term repercussions for how poorly Americans viewed the Biden presidency. For Democrats during Trump's first term. When Americans thought about the Democratic Party, they largely thought about Barack Obama, who was viewed pretty well in even after Hillary Clinton lost in 2016. And so there are longer term repercussions there that the party has not sorted out. Now, if they are going to sort them out, it could be by elevating a really strong choice in 2028. But we're quite a ways away from that. There's certainly no guarantee. So we're going to have to wait and see how things play out. In the meantime, you are right. If somebody really like, if there was ever a time for somebody to come in and shake shit up, it's right. Now again, I'm not holding my breath. It may happen in individual states, which is if it is going to succeed, probably have an easier time of succeeding in individual states with more of an independent streak than out of the gates nationwide. We've talked about this a little bit. What it would actually take a massively wealthy individual who really wanted to run an independent campaign and not back Democrats or Republicans. And at the moment it seems like massively wealthy individuals mostly want to back Democrats or Republicans. But, you know, we'll see last question here and then we'll move on to some primaries. This has all resulted in a 10 point advantage, roughly for Democrats in the New York Times poll on the generic ballot. The averages right now show Democrats leading by somewhere around six points. Does all of this suggest to you that the generic ballot polling today is a lagging indicator that you think this role, the gap, will yawn further as we get closer to November?
- [15:37]
B
I mean, history suggests that, right. Like you don't necessarily have to look at these polls. You can look at the trajectory of the generic ballot in past cycles, past midterm cycles, and see that it tends to improve for the party out of power in the last few months of the race. And we're not even in the last few months of the race yet. So I would, setting aside the New York Times Siena poll or any other individual poll, I would expect the advantage for Democrats to increase on the generic ballot because that's what usually happens.
- [16:07]
A
I agree with that. But I wouldn't say apart from that, that I, that the generic ballot is a lagging indicator. I have every reason to believe that the generic ballot as it stands today, is an accurate representation of how people feel today. And that may not be how they feel in a month or how many months away is the election? Five, six?
- [16:23]
C
A little bit less than six.
- [16:25]
A
Okay. Five to six months. And so, you know, and that can happen in either direction. But I agree historically it does tend to be worse for the president's party. I will say though, that, you know, most generic ballot polls that we get right now, including the times one, are among registered voters and eventually they're gonna switch over to likely voters. And we expect that to help Democrats for a variety of reasons, both because they have the passion behind them right now and because their coalition has become the one that is more likely to vote.
- [16:49]
B
Yeah, I would say in most polls just to like as a hint to what the likely voter models might say in the future among voters that say they are extremely likely, absolutely certain, like, you know, the people who say they're most likely to vote. Democrats advantage is larger than the top line pretty much across the board. All in all of the surveys. So when pollsters do switch to that likely voter model, I would expect to see that advantage increase for the Democrats.
- [17:13]
C
GD Politics is powered by you, the listeners. If you enjoy the show, the data driven analysis, the genuine curiosity and lack of partisan bs, and yes, sometimes the silliness too, please consider becoming a paid subscriber at GDPolitics.com. paid subscribers help make the podcast possible, and they also get twice the number of episodes and access to the paid subscriber chat where you can send me whatever questions you've got. Independent political media only works if the people who value it support it. So if GD Politics is part of your week, head to GDPolitics.com and become a paid subscriber. That's GDPolitics.com I so appreciate it.
- [17:54]
A
Thank you.
- [17:55]
C
All right, let's talk about Bill Cassidy's loss. The Senate primary in Louisiana is going to go to a runoff between Trump endorsee Julia Letlow and Freedom Caucus founder John Fleming. I'm going to quote my former colleague Jeff Skelley here. Bill Cassidy is the first incumbent senator to finish worse than second in a primary since Senator Hattie Carraway finished fourth in Arkansas's 1944 Democratic nomination contest.
- [18:22]
A
Good stat, Jeffrey.
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B
Yeah, yeah, I don't even, I've never even heard that name before.
- [18:27]
C
Cassidy's defeat is also one of the worst experienced by Republicans who supported Trump's second impeachment. So Cassidy got just 25% of the vote on Saturday. What happened?
- [18:40]
B
Well, Louisiana voters were really mad that he voted to impeach the president. I mean, I think that's really the big, the biggest part of the story here is it's the impeachment vote.
- [18:53]
C
I think, I think there's more to the story.
- [18:54]
B
Oh, do you?
- [18:55]
C
I mean, I think that is what kicks off this whole process, which is that Trump is upset that Cassidy voted to convict in the Senate after January 6th. But a couple other things happened as well, which is that, you know, Cassidy's maybe always been a difficult fit for Louisiana. He's like the technocratic minded doctor who used to be a Democrat who tries to do some bipartisan things, got tripped up a bit in supporting vaccines, but then also supporting RFK Jr's confirmation, which is like alienating people who might have been naturally more aligned with him. At the same time, Republicans changed the voting rules in Louisiana. So Democrats who could have voted in a jungle primary in the past, you know, in the past it used to be top two move on to the general election. They switched it so that only Republicans are voting in the Republican primary. So there's voting changes. And then on top of that, Julia Letlow has advantages that go beyond just the fact that Trump endorsed her. You know, she has a pretty sympathetic story in the fact that her husband, after being elected to Congress shortly before taking office, died from COVID complications. She's not a flamethrower, so she didn't go all in on, like, being MAGA aligned in this race. And in fact, she has a weird history. Right back in 2020, she was up for, I think, president of University of Louisiana at Monroe. And she talked about, she spoke in favor of DEI initiatives and saying that it was shameful the lack of, you know, female leadership in the university. And it was actually Bill Cassidy who was running ads being like, Julia Letlow is the pro D candidate in the Senate primary. So, like, yes, it all starts with Bill Cassidy voting to convict Trump, but it gets messier fast.
- [20:46]
B
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I don't know if, you know, can I. Am I allowed to talk about a different podcast on this podcast?
- [20:52]
C
No, never. Censorship.
- [20:54]
B
I don't know if, you know, the
- [20:55]
C
People's Republic of GD Politics.
- [20:57]
B
The. There's a podcast called the Focus Group from the Bulwark that's hosted by Sarah Longwell, and she had an episode recently with Louisiana Republican voters. So what's different about this is not polls. This is qualitative research where you actually go talk to voters. When she went to speak to Republican primary voters in Louisiana, every single one of them that was voting against Cassidy started with the impeachment vote. Yeah, like the. Every single person she spoke to said, I will not vote for someone who voted to convict Donald Trump.
- [21:28]
C
Yeah.
- [21:29]
B
So, like, that's why I think that's. It really boils down to that. Like, you can have a conversation about why Julia Letlow was favored over John Fleming, perhaps, but I think as far as the Cassidy of it all, I really do think it begins and ends with impeachment.
- [21:42]
C
Well, okay, Impeachment, plus changing the voting rules. I mean, if you look at the Republicans, the Republicans who have been able to buck Trump, in fact even support his impeachment and stay in office, it's pretty much to a person because they've been running in a non conventional primary where they were able to get unaligned and Democratic votes. I mean, probably the most famous example here is somebody like Lisa Murkowski, but also David Valadao in California. And so I think that is quite important. Which brings us to Tuesday night's test for Thomas Massie in Kentucky's 4th congressional district. I've taken to calling his last year or two something of the creation of the YOLO caucus, which maybe includes Marjorie Taylor Greene, a little bit of Lauren Boebert. We Republicans who don't break with Trump necessarily on the democracy type stuff, but break with Trump in ideological ways and have even flaunted it. So just to list a few of the places where Massie has bucked Trump in his second term. He opposed the big beautiful bill for debt and deficit reasons. He opposed both Iran military interventions and the Maduro ouster. He also joined up with a few other YOLO caucus Republicans to force the release of of the Epstein files. And here is his maybe this encapsulates everything that I'm talking about. His notable quotable I vote with the President 91% of the time, the 9% of the time my party is taking up for pedophiles, bankrupting this country or starting another war.
- [23:17]
A
Tell us what you really think.
- [23:18]
C
Yolo he's hoping to keep his seat against Trump endorsed challenger Ed Gallrein even before the results come in. I think the fact that this has been as brutal of a campaign as it has been probably says says something at least that's different about the Louisiana primary we were just talking about. This is the most expensive House primary in history according to ad impact. More than $25 million has been spent on advertising, roughly $35 million including other campaign spending. Mary, what does the polling look like?
- [23:49]
B
We've got a number of polls in in this race in the last couple of days last week or so. They're all single digit polls. They range from Massey ahead by two up to Colerine ahead by eight or so. So it's looking like Colorado maybe has a bit of a polling advantage, but it's not a huge one. There's at least a couple pollsters that show this as dead even. Rich Baris at Big Data Poll is running a tracking series. So we will get one more number this evening from, from his survey. I believe that will be the last that's at least the last that I know about. So it's looking fairly close. I will say, like a lot of the pollsters that are in this race are Republican affiliated pollsters. Some of the sample sizes are pretty small. Now I'm not super concerned about Republican affiliated pollsters being the only ones to pull a Republican primary, but we don't have a ton of like neutral stuff. So yeah, it's, it's a bit of a toss up maybe slight edge to, to go Rhine based on the polls.
- [24:50]
A
Yeah, I'll also throw in that House primary polls are basically the highest type of error polls you can get because primaries are harder to pull than general elections because you don't have kind of partisanship to anchor yourself on. And the smaller the jurisdiction, the less accurate the polls tend to be. So I would encourage people to have very wide error bars on this one. Obviously, I think it is a very competitive race. I think the money shows that story. It's obviously very interesting because Massie clearly is just like a true believer in the kind of libertarian conservative project that he and, you know, a few others, like Rand and Ron Paul for instance, you know, a fellow Kentucky and Rand Paul have kind of been, been sticking by and he has generally been able to get away with it. He's been kind of seen as like, oh, you know, Thomas Massie, you know, he's going to, he's going to do his own thing. But Trump really decided to go after him this year. And I think, you know, even though he wasn't an impeacher, as you said, Ghislaine, he's not kind of one of those, you know, luccini, standing up for democracy types. I think it's akin to that in terms of like, most of the time when Trump makes an endorsement, it's a really, it's a layup for him. You know, most of the time he's endorsing incumbents who are gonna, are already gonna win. The rest of the time, usually it's like a wide open primary and somebody like J.D. vance, he like points to him and he's like you. And then like, that's enough to get them over the hump. In only a few cases has he really gone after an incumbent. And that is I think the most challenging thing to do. I think one data point in favor of Massie being in real trouble is a couple weeks back in Indiana, you saw Trump go on his revenge tour. The state senators who voted against redistricting there. And I believe of the seven candidates he endorsed five, one, only one lost and one is still tbd because I believe that race is currently separated by three votes. So I think clearly, you know, we've seen this for years at this point. Trump's endorsement is incredibly powerful in primaries. He was also able to oust a bunch of people like Cheney when he did his previous revenge tour. So I do think that Massie is in real danger. But yeah, I think based on the error bars on the polls, I wouldn't be Surprised if either of them ended up winning by double digits.
- [26:56]
C
Longtime listeners to this podcast will have heard this advice many times. If you want to take lessons away from the election, don't necessarily look at who wins, but look at the margin. Does the fact that this is a competitive race mean something to us already? Like, this seems to be very different from what just happened in Louisiana. Why, like, what's the. Is. Is there significance in the closeness of it before we even get results on Tuesday night?
- [27:25]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think before this feuding with Trump, I think if you asked people who had any impression of Thomas Massie, what his brand was, what his image was, I think people would say principled conservative, right? Like, that is really, I think what he is trying to project. He's like, I'm consistent in my values. I don't vote to increase the debt and deficit because I'm a principled conservative. Donald Trump has been coming after him, trying to change that reputation and call him a rhino or whatever other kind of names he's calling. Right. So, like, the question is, is Trump's sway enough to pull that principled conservative brand off of Massie in the eyes of Republican primary voters? Right. Because like, that, I think, is what has kept this close. Is that pre existing image that, like, yeah, sometimes I'm against the president and it's because the president's not doing conservative stuff. I think that's how Thomas Massie would explain himself were he here to do it. So, like, that's the question. Is, is principled conservative brand enough to overcome the, like, the Trump attacks?
- [28:37]
C
All right, let's talk about Georgia. I think we're going to run through Georgia and Pennsylvania a little more quickly so we have time to talk about the big polling conference.
- [28:46]
A
That's what everyone's here for, which is
- [28:47]
C
what everyone's here for. We're also gonna have a reaction podcast to the results later in the week. So we're gonna have another bite of the apple in terms of digging through all of this stuff. But on the Senate side in Georgia, Jon Ossoff is running unopposed, unsurprisingly. On the Republican side, five guys are running for the chance to take on Ossoff, including two reps in the House, Buddy Carter and Mike Collins. Carter and Collins have both run towards Trump. Trump has not endorsed either. Then there's Derek Dooley, the former college football coach backed by Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. His relationship with Trump has been a bit more complicated. He's running as the less MAGA coded, more establishment friendly candidate. What are we Watching for on Tuesday night. Nathaniel, we'll start with you because you were excited to talk about Georgia.
- [29:31]
A
I think that this race as well as the governor's race is going to go to a runoff. Georgia, like many Southern states, requires a majority in order to advance. I guess I'm looking to see what the exact order of finish is and if that inspires Trump to come off the sidelines in favor of somebody. I think it looks like Mike Collins is the one who is probably going to finish first. And the second runoff slot is between Dooley and Carter. But you know, we kind of saw with Texas that like, you know, Cornyn's like maybe better than expected showing people were talking about, oh, maybe that'll get him endorsement. Obviously it didn't, but I think that the order could matter. But yeah, I don't think this one is done and dusted other than obviously the question right now is who gets into the runoff and then after that it's dvd.
- [30:11]
B
Yeah, I mean, the most recent polling suggestions that Dooley is probably favored over Carter to get into the runoff. But again, we've had many discussions about like the error bars on these kinds of primary polls. It's pretty difficult to get a sense of who's going to show up in primaries.
- [30:25]
C
I want to get into maybe the more interesting question for the long term, which is how competitive this race will be come November. And if you look at some of the recent polling, it suggests for a purplish, reddish state like Georgia, Jon also have a notable advantage. I don't wanna get too carried away here, but do you think that who wins on Tuesday night makes a big difference in terms of how liable Republicans are to win the seat from Democrats?
- [30:59]
A
I mean, Collins is quite conservative. I don't think any of the candidates is really who Republicans really want. Obviously they wanted Brian Kemp and he did not run in the race. But I mean, you have on one hand Ossoff, who is a telegenic guy with a ton of money running in a very good year for Democrats, as we discussed, in a swing state. It's a purple state now, I would say just plain old purple. And then you have like three kind of lackluster Republican candidates for different reasons. I think Dooley, you know, maybe ideologically would be a little more palatable. But he's also a first time candidate. He's a, he's got a lot of like, he's not very inspiring. I think like Kemp kind of like plucked him. He wanted somebody to represent the, the more establishment lane. But he is, he's the football team that he coached was Tennessee. It wasn't Georgia. He's the son of the Georgia coach. So, like, it's kind of a little bit of a he's kind of like a an echo of of the candidate that they really wanted. So, yeah, I think Ossoff is favorite either way.
- [31:54]
B
What I'm more interested in, actually is whether Ossoff's strength is enough to help what I expect to be. Keisha Lance Bottoms in the governor's race, take that over the finish line because,
- [32:07]
C
well, let's make that transition. Let's talk about the governor's race.
- [32:11]
B
Not only is there the competitive Senate race in Georgia, there is also going to be a governor's race in Georgia. And again, this is now a purple state in a midterm year that we anticipate to be quite good for Democrats. So there's a big question of, like, whether Democrats can flip that that governorship in November. And we expect Keisha Lance Bottoms probably to be the Democratic nominee to the former mayor of Atlanta.
- [32:36]
C
But that could go to a runoff. Even it's unclear if she's going to break 50%.
- [32:40]
B
Yes, it's unclear whether or not it will go to a runoff. I expect even in a runoff, she would be favored over any of the other candidates. So, like, I don't anticipate her her losing that. On the the Republican side, we're expecting a runoff probably between Jackson and Jones. But again, I think if, if this were in a vacuum and it was just a governor's race and there was no Senate race, I would say Keisha Lance Bottoms is probably not as compelling of a Democratic candidate in Georgia as you could have. But Jon Ossoff is. So like, that's my question is can Ossoff carry Keisha Lance Bottoms along with him?
- [33:17]
C
Yeah. Democrats have not won a governor's race in Georgia since 1998. And I'll say on the Republican side, just to fill out the picture, Trump has endorsed in this primary in favor of Bert Jones, the current lieutenant governor. Also running, our billionaire Rick Jackson, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who who sort of famously rebuffed Trump when he asked him to find votes in after the 2020 election. And then also Attorney General Chris Carr. On the Democratic side, as mentioned, it's former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, former lieutenant governor slash former Republican, who you would have heard on this podcast, Jeff Duncan and then former state Senator Jason Estevez.
- [33:52]
B
And can I mention, actually our polling average at 50 plus 1 has the Trump endorsey in second place right now. Um, so we're talking about the strength of Trump's endorsement in Kentucky. Looking at this, in Georgia, that candidate is in second place in our bowling average.
- [34:07]
A
So Georgia's obviously a state that has bucked Trump's endorsement before. You know, Trump went on the rampage against Raffensperger and Kemp, and they both survived in their primaries back in 2022. And I will also say that Jones is very, very far right. So he is, I think a. He would be a kind of like Kerry, like, type of candidate for Republicans. And so I think that that might be giving some rep. Primary voters some pause as well.
- [34:32]
C
Okay, Mary, this is your moment. Let's talk about Pennsylvania, a state where I have not done any background research. So I'm going to turn things over to you. What are you watching in your home state of Pennsylvania?
- [34:43]
B
Well, I'll be honest, there's not a lot of, like, really high level competitive primaries in Pennsylvania this, this cycle. We don't have a Senate race up this year. And in the governor's election, Josh Shapiro is running unopposed, Stacy Garrity is running unopposed. So we already have our matchup for Novemb governor's race. There are some House primaries that you know are going to be competitive. The third district, which is in Philadelphia, the incumbent Democrat is not seeking reelection. And so you've got like a whole bunch of Philadelphia political players that are all competing for that. I like. I don't know who's ahead. The polls are really muddled. It's one of those things where there's a whole lot of credible candidates. It's very difficult to discern someone's going to win that with like 30% of the vote or something. There's also a competitive primary in the seventh. So, you know, there's a couple House races here and there, but nothing stands out as very exciting on the Pennsylvania ballot.
- [35:40]
C
But when we look ahead to November, the Pennsylvania ballot gets interesting, right?
- [35:44]
B
Oh, for sure. Of course. We have the Marquis governor's race. That will be Josh Shapiro versus that's
- [35:51]
A
not gonna be interesting.
- [35:53]
B
It's interesting to me, actually, given the ambitions of our governor. I'm actually also keeping an eye on the Lieutenant Governor's race. So Pennsylvania is one of the states where the Lieutenant Governor is elected separately from the governor. It's a separate ballot item. And in the primary, the incumbent Democratic Lt. Gov. Austin Davis is running unopposed. There is a primary for the Republican candidate, although I don't think it's. That's very competitive. But that election actually could matter. Quite a lot, depending on how things go for our governor in the coming years.
- [36:30]
C
And on the House side, there are a number of competitive races where that will help determine the margin in the House.
- [36:38]
B
Yes. There are a couple of seats that Republicans flipped in 2024 in the northeastern part of the state. I'm thinking of the 7th and the 8th in particular. That will be important. The 10th district, which is around Harrisburg. That's Scott Perry's district. He narrowly won that in 2024. It looks like the challenger in 2024 that he ran against is coming back for another bite at the apple. So that will also be quite competitive. I mean, Perry. Every year people think Perry's gonna lose and he ekes it out. So we'll see if that happens again.
- [37:13]
A
I mean, I will say, you know, he hasn't faced an environment quite like this one, potentially. I think actually those three races may foregone conclusions by the time people vote in November. And we might be talking about the first District. Is this the year that Brian Fitzpatrick finally loses? He is spicy, the poster child for moderation in the House Republican caucus. And he has been swimming against the tide in a. Basically, I think. I don't know if it was double digits, but a pretty blue district, pretty pro Harris district, and I feel like it might catch up to him this year. We'll see.
- [37:48]
C
All right. Lastly, you were both at APOR this past weekend in Los Angeles, which is the American association of Public Opinion Researchers. So we have a very special edition of Good Data, Bad Data, not data. So I've asked both of you to spotlight an example that falls into each one of those categories. A good data example. I'm sure that will not be very hard. A bad data example.
- [38:10]
B
What's hard is picking one.
- [38:12]
C
Hopefully there wasn't too much bad data at, you know, the big polling conference. But. But I'll leave it to you guys. And then not data. Who do we want to. Nathaniel, you've been a little quiet in your sort of post red eye stupor.
- [38:25]
A
What? Oh, thanks for waking me up, Galen.
- [38:28]
C
Let's kick things off with you.
- [38:29]
A
So there was a lot of good data presented at apor. A lot of thoughtful people trying to solve the problem. The many problems of the polling industry. I think my favorite, we always try to think about how to quantify uncertainty and how to communicate that. Right. And I really liked a presentation by Andrew Mercer at the Pew Research center where he basically made a proposal for a new margin of error stat called margin of total error. So the traditional margin of error that you see, reported with polls is really only one piece of the puzzle. It's only reporting on the margin of sampling error. But we know from past election results that the actual error is much wider. So you know, we know that like the average error, for instance in like, you know, Senate races is I think like four or five points. And you know, that's larger than a margin of error. And margin of error is supposed to encompass 95% of situations. And so, so Andrew did a very kind of like elegant calculation that modeled past historical error in the polls similar to the way that we did it at 5:38. And in fact he used our data to do so and basically came up with this new stat that he, you know, I think is going to encourage pollsters to use. The unfortunate part about it is that, you know, when you do the math in terms of like encompassing 95% of scenarios, you're looking at margin of errors of all like 8 to 9 points, which is obviously very wide. But you know, I think that is a more honest reflection of how often like, or how, how wide those, those error bars are.
- [39:56]
C
I heard a gasp from Mary when
- [39:57]
B
you, yeah, eight points.
- [40:00]
A
I mean it's not bad. It's just what it is, right? I mean if you really are looking at the 95% confidence interval, you know, most of the time the error like, you know, half the time the error is 5 points or fewer roughly. But, but sometimes you do see those six or seven point errors. And if you really want to make sure people are prepared for the full extent of how off polls can be, you do kind of have to be like, yeah, eight or nine points.
- [40:21]
C
Well, luckily for pollsters, there's going to be less emphasis on polling now that folks have the prediction markets and so they'll get overwhelmed by the uncertainty of the total margin of error. And just look at Calcium Polymarket to tell them exactly what's going to happen happen in the next election.
- [40:38]
A
Down to the decimal point.
- [40:39]
C
Yeah, exactly. Good thing that we learned all of those lessons about trying to represent uncertainty in elections just for Polymarket and Kelshi to come on over and make it all seem so much more simple. But okay. Congratulations to Pew Research on that good data award from the APOR conference. Mary.
- [40:59]
B
It was really hard for me to choose, but I really enjoyed a talk by Mark Trussler who works at the NBC News decision desk. This is like deeply nerdy and I am sorry in advance advance friends about what's about to happen to you. Mark did a talk about partisan non response within demographic cells I told you it's going to get so nerdy. So we were talking earlier about looking at the cross tabs versus the article or the top line in the, particularly in the New York Times Sienna poll where you have like slight differences in like the rounding or whatever. So what Mark was looking at was what partisan non response looks like at the subgroup level. And what he found was like, you know, we adjust all our polls with weighting and so on and so forth. It's very common to wait to some form of partisanship, be that recalled vote or partisan identification, whatever to try to make sure that your sample is representative. What they found in the research from the NBC News decision desk polling with survey monkey is that the non response, like the difference in the number of Republicans and Democrats that you would expect in the individual demographic cells is not correlated with the top line level of non response. So even when you do your adjusting on the top line, the individual cells are still messed up and there's basically nothing you can do to fix them. Now why is that important? It means when you're looking at trends, comparing one survey to another survey by the same pollster on the individual subgroup, subgroup level, you're going to have partisan response bias that cannot be corrected.
- [42:30]
C
So for example, to make this concrete, if you want to look at how support for Trump among amongst Latino voters has changed, there's a lot more variability or there's a much larger sort of like margin of error, if you will, than folks might be expecting.
- [42:46]
B
Yes. And even if like you had a sample that at the top line was like not democratic enough, so you weighted up the Democrats at the level of the Latinos, it, it's completely unrelated whether it was not democratic enough or not. Like, it's like there's no relationship on that individual level to what's going on at the top line level.
- [43:07]
C
Okay, congratulations to NBC for that award. Now, a little bit harsher of an award here, the bad data award. Nathaniel, time for you to get really spicy.
- [43:19]
A
It's not that spicy. So this example comes from Blue Labs and they did an experiment and even they would, the point of the experiment was that this turned out to be bad data. So they would agree with this. But I thought it was clever and out of the box. But basically one problem that you see in surveys is drop off, which is to say that somebody, it's really hard to get somebody to take a survey in the first place. But once you get them, you really don't want them to give up halfway through and be like, oh, you know what? I'm bored or I need to go mow the lawn or whatever and let's hang up or click out of the box or whatever. And so this study from Blue Labs was trying to solve this problem of how can we keep people to make sure that they do the entire survey. And what they tested was telling people a joke. They told. They, as they said at the beginning, they said, what is the right price for a chimney? And if you stay through the entire survey, we'll tell you the punchline at the end. Does anybody want to want to ask, guess what the price of a chimney is?
- [44:19]
C
What is the right price of a chimney?
- [44:21]
B
Is it on fire sale?
- [44:24]
A
You're close. The correct price for a chimney is nothing because it's on the house.
- [44:32]
C
I gotta start doing that with this, with that, with this podcast. You know, tell a joke at the beginning. Maybe people stay till the end.
- [44:38]
A
There you go. Well, no, you shouldn't do that because actually, Blue Labs found that that did not help at all. And so maybe they just didn't find
- [44:44]
C
a compelling joke to tell.
- [44:46]
A
Yeah, that's true. That's a good point. Yeah. I don't know. But anyway, I thought that was clever and shows that kind of like, people are trying out of the box things to solve the problems of the polling industry.
- [44:56]
C
Okay. So that telling a joke and making people wait did not. Was not compelling enough to keep people from mowing the lawn. So bad. Bad data there. Although. Great experiment, Mary.
- [45:08]
B
Yeah. I will highlight a talk from Josh Pasek at the University of Michigan. So Josh was talking about claims that pollsters in 2024 were significantly hurting their polls. So this is a phenomenon where pollsters, rather than, like, reporting their results as they have them, they tweak here and there to try to make sure the results look more or less like the results of other pollsters. They don't want to go out on a limb. They want to, you know, be in the middle of the pack so no one can accuse them of being wrong more than other people were wrong or whatever. And so Josh took a look at the data and did some statistical analyses to show that actually that really wasn't happening in the 2024 election polls. He looked at the individual pollster level and did some analysis to try to determine whether their polls looked too much like the polls that had recently been published just before them or whether they deviated from the polls that would come, like, immediately after in the future. So these would be signs that the pollsters were hurting and found no significant evidence of hurting in 2024 pollsters.
- [46:15]
C
So the bad data here would be the idea that pollsters were hurting in 2024.
- [46:20]
B
Correct. It was mostly based on people using their eyeballs and not their math.
- [46:24]
C
Congratulations to University of Michigan there. Now for best for last, not data. At a data conference, were you able to find anything that wasn't data?
- [46:35]
A
Yes, yes I was because the theme of the conference unofficially was AI Surprise, surprise, the theme of everything these days. But there was a fair amount of talk about synthetic data, which, and synthetic respondents, which I think we've talked about on this podcast before. It's the idea that instead of pulling real people, you pull AI bots who are trained on real people. And so there was a whole panel about this and you know, it was interesting to hear kind of like the side, you know, arguments on both sides or like findings on both sides. So folks from the Pew Research center basically, you know, created their own like synthetic panel and found that it was A, really expensive to create and then B, the data it gave them was really bad. But then on the other hand, Gallup, which just announced last week that it was going to be experimenting with synthetic respondents, they presented some findings that said that actually their, their synthetic data was basically about as good as non probability polling, which is the like often type of polling that, that some pollsters do. And so it's clear to me that this is not going away as a trend as long as polling is expensive and people are hard to reach. And you know, I think that that is kind of philosophically not a great thing because the point of polling in public opinion is to actually ask the public what they think. But I don't know. I mean it's something that we're going to have to keep tracking. But I would definitely put it in the not data category because I just don't think that it is actually measuring anything.
- [48:00]
C
It especially, I'll say, worries me if we enter, if the next stage of politics that we enter doesn't look all that much like the last stage of politics. This kind of, of synthetic data can work in a stable environment because so many of our divides and trends and preferences have become entrenched in this current dynamic. But when things shift, they can sometimes shift quite quickly and then you're caught left footed. That kind of happened in 2016, although many of the trends that have continued over the past decade are rooted in things that happened before 2016 as well. But like, I worry about folks being caught flat footed if they're relying too much on the past and not being open minded enough. About what the future could bring.
- [48:48]
B
Yeah, I think that's a great point.
- [48:50]
C
Okay, Mary. Finally, not data.
- [48:53]
B
Yes. So I stopped by to chat with some folks from the U.S. census Bureau. And I asked them, given all of the redistricting that we have been seeing, when they will have full demographic Data for the 120th Congress. That is the Congress that will be elected this November. I'm interested in all of the districts by all of the different demographic features that the census collects. And they do this for every Congress. And usually they only have to do it the one time, maybe, maybe twice because of a couple states redistricting. But because so many states have been redistricting and we don't even know the status of a lot of these districts, it is unclear if we will have full demographic data from the U.S. census Bureau for the 120th Congress before the November election. And that's not the census's fault.
- [49:50]
C
Fair enough. Okay. I am going to close things out. I was not at the conference, sadly, I hope to be next year. But I have a not data to add to the pile, which is a bit of a sad one, so hang tight. But we found out, all of us, late last week that ABC News took FiveThirtyEight's archives off the Internet. So those links to all of our work there now reroute to an ABC landing page. And it means that a lot of the projects that I think longtime listeners sort of went to FiveThirtyEight to look for, sometimes repeatedly. I mean, for me in particular, what bummed me out about all of this is like, I've heard from teachers for the past decade talking about including our resources in their syllabi. You know, in particular, folks reached out to me about the gerrymandering project. A bunch of teachers had that incorporated. I found Clemson University syllabi that had all of these links to FiveThirtyEight content that are now broken or now just lead you to an ABC landing page. And so I guess we can say this is no longer data on the open Web. You can go on the Wayback Machine. Yes. And. And some of it is rendered in a readable way. Other interactives are totally not. But yeah, our archives that we spent, I mean, they went back to 2008. So what did we have, like 17 years of archives are now not data.
- [51:17]
A
Yeah. I will add, yes. That, you know, for folks who are do want to still access old 538 site. A data journalist from Reuters very helpfully created an index page, fivethirtyeight index. Com, which are basically has a list of all of those Internet Archive sites. In addition, our data is still on GitHub@data.538.com tell them that the New York Times already.
- [51:43]
C
The New York Times already reported it,
- [51:45]
A
but also people have already downloaded. That data has been archived as well. But yes, if you're a researcher, if you're a data journalist, download the data, use the data. A lot of it is still there.
- [51:56]
B
I will also say if you're a researcher looking for polls, you can always reach out to me at 50 plus one and we'll get you settled.
- [52:05]
C
I feel like we've poured one out for 5:38 so many times on this podcast now. It's been such a slow, it's been a slow death by a thousand cuts. The archives are still up, so I hope we don't have to mourn that one anytime.
- [52:18]
B
Telling them to.
- [52:20]
C
Maybe I'll bleep that. I'll bleep what I just said. But Mary, Nathaniel, thank you so much for joining me today.
- [52:28]
B
Thank you, Galen.
- [52:29]
A
Thank you, Galen.
- [52:30]
C
My name is Galen Drook. Remember to become a subscriber to this podcast@gdpolitics.com and wherever you get your podcasts. Paid subscribers get about twice the number of episodes. You can also join in our paid subscriber chat and pass along questions for us to discuss on the show. And you ensure that we can keep making a podcast that prioritizes curiosity, rigor and a sense of humor. Also, be a friend of the POD and go give us a five star rating wherever you listen to podcasts, maybe even tell a friend about us. Thanks for listening and we will see you soon.