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- [00:00]
A
All right, lenny brauner, senior data. All right, lenny brauner, senior. Senior. God, I can't.
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Senior.
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Senior. Hello and welcome to the GD Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Drake. I'd like to say that this podcast is driven by three principles. Curiosity, rigor, and a sense of humor. And you, dear listeners, share those qualities, certainly when it comes to curiosity. So I collected all the questions you submitted since we last recorded a mailbag episode at the end of November. And even if I just limited us to the best ones, we'd still be looking at an at least three hour long podcast. I didn't want to let your questions go unanswered, so I decided to sort them into two categories and we're going to do two mailbag episodes. The theme of the first is current events. The theme of the second is Big Think esoteric political questions. So next week we're going to go esoteric. Today we're doing current events. And I don't know if you've heard, but there is a lot to discuss. There's the ice surge in Minneapolis, the shooting of Renee Goode and related protests, the federal investigation of Fed Chair Jerome Powell, major protests in Iran and threats of military action by Trump. Significant election news. Democrat Mary Peltola is running for Senate in Alaska. Democrat Tim Waltz is not running for governor in Minnesota. The White House is meeting with Denmark and Greenland as we record this podcast. And oh, I almost forgot, there's the story that was the only thing anyone could talk about just last week. I think it was Venezuela. We seem to be cycling between a different major headline just about every hour. But here with me to make sense of it all and answer your questions on these topics is dear friend of the podcast and senior data scientist at the Washington Post, Lenny Brauner. Welcome, Lenny.
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B
It's good to be here. As always. Thanks for having me.
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It's great to see you for the first time in the new year. I have a couple updates before we dive in, which is that first, our live show on January 27 is sold out. So excited to see you all there. We are going to be doing a live Democratic primary draft and paid subscribers will get a recording of that in their podcast feeds and@gdpolitics.com, the video, at least after the fact. The other piece of news is that our seasonal merch shop is going away at the end of the month, so get your merch@gdpolitics.com merch Lenny, I think the last time I saw you, you told me something very important about the GD Politics t Shirts, right?
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They're so comfortable.
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So comfortable. And what else? What else did you do?
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They make you look great. They make. I highly recommend everyone gets them because they fit so well.
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I've been getting this feedback a good amount. They do fit very well. In fact, I think, Lenny, you told me that they make you look particularly buff. So if you're listening to this podcast and you want, you know, a new T shirt to really show off your physique in the new year, apparently it's our good data, bad data, not data. T shirts@gdpolitics.com merch okay, Lenny, I won't embarrass you anymore. One final reminder or piece of news is that you can, you know, if you're listening to all of these questions and you think, hey, I have questions of my own, you can submit them any number of places. I'll be honest. The easiest way to submit is substack. So you can go send me a message there. You can join the paid subscriber chat. You can also find me on Twitter and politics. Com. Okay, we've gotten all our housekeeping out of the way, Lenny, let's begin with some listener questions. And our first question comes from Joseph. He says here, Galen, Polymarket has Mary Peltola at 53% to win Alaska Senate in November. Buy, sell or hold. By the way, the podcast is due for some buy, sell, hold. Joseph, you're right. I think maybe we'll. We'll do a buy, sell, hold segment in the near future. But I'll say that I looked this up on Polymarket before recording. Her odds are now down to 46%. These markets tend to shift a lot when news is happening. It's not particularly well capitalized at the moment. Nonetheless, though, let's stick with the number that Joseph originally submitted. So Mary Peltola at 53% to win the Alaska Senate race. Lenny, are you buying, selling or holding?
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B
I mean, given the information you just gave me, I'd be selling, but I think I would be selling either way.
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A
What about at 46%?
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Probably still sell, but it is closer to what I would expect the probability of her winning to be right now.
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Oh, interesting. Okay, so just lay that out for me.
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B
It's an uphill battle for Democrats in that state. Obviously she has won statewide before, which is a good sign for her and a good sign for Democrats. But Dan Sullivan isn't particularly unpopular and Alaska is continues to be a state that leans Republican. Cook has it as lean R Also. Now with the news that Peltola is running so I don't think her chances of winning are more than 50% right now and closer to 40%, something like that. We do have a lot of time between now and when the election happens, and we do have some polling that seems to suggest, I'm not going to say call her the favorite, but like, you know, her has a very good chance. We've got an Alaska Survey Research poll out today where she was ahead 48 to 46, which is obviously close but good. She won statewide before, like I said, in a year that actually wasn't that great for Democrats in 2022. And so a year like we expect to be this one, which has a sort of higher Democratic turnout advantage and she's obviously well positioned.
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A
One thing that I thought was interesting that maybe backs up your position of a 40% chance, not a 53% chance, was that the overall odds of Democrats winning the Senate chamber did not change at all on polymarket after Mary Peltola got in the race. Which does it really make sense if you're trying to look at the betting markets as a whole? I'll say, though, that neither of these markets are particularly well capitalized. Even the, you know, the broader Senate chamber is still only in the hundreds of thousands in terms of the amount of money bet on either position. So Republicans had a 66% chance of holding the Senate before she got in. They still have a 66% chance of holding the Senate after she got in. I don't want to belabor these betting markets because as I said, I mean.
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B
You could create a scenario in which basically the entire probability distribution hinges on whether Democrats win Ohio, which is the fourth state they would need to win in order to win a majority. And the conditional probability that Democrats win Ohio, given that they win Alaska is like, it doesn't change at all, like whether or not they win Alaska or not. So like, you can construct like a scenario in which that isn't as ridiculous as it sounds, but I think it's not obvious that that would be true.
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Basically, you're saying that the results in Alaska and Ohio are not correlated at all.
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B
Well, that the difference is so big between the partisanship of those two states. Ohio is so much more Republican than Alaska. I don't think that's true. But like, you could say it's some of the argue like that where like the effective. The effective also, you know, Senate races are a lot less correlated than presidential outcomes. I mean, like a lot less correlated. Right. Like the difference is actually significant in terms of like the correlation there.
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A
And part of the reason is because of the specifics of, you know, candidate quality mattering, for example, which gets us into Mary Peltola's track record as a candidate in Alaska. In the past, she ran on, what is it? Fish, family freedom. And she had mailers that said that she was the only candidate that was pro guns, pro jobs, and pro choice. Obviously, she'll try to run a campaign that's tailored to her state in a, you know, very partisan environment. How much. How much Runway does that give you?
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B
Oh, I mean, it. It. It obviously does help. Right. Candidate quality still makes a difference, you know, although war wars that you covered so closely over the last year.
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Wins above replacement.
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Wins above replacement. Exactly. Sort of point to the fact that there's clearly something there, especially obviously in close races. And the polling here suggests it's going to be a close race. The last election that she won in Alaska in 2022 suggests that it's going to be a close race. The last election that she lost in Alaska in 2024 suggests it's going to be a close race. We have to be, like, a little bit careful here, obviously, because of the rank choice voting. But in the special election that she initially won in 2022, she beat Sarah Palin by 3 percentage points. And then by the third round, actually, the difference was, I think, 10 percentage points, which is a pretty large difference. And then in 2024, when she lost her race, Nick Begich won by sort of two and a half percentage points or so. So mostly pretty close races. I will add that in the past, she has also benefited from Lisa Murkowski's effective endorsement, which she had in 2022, and it seems so that this time around, Lisa Murkowski has endorsed Dan Sullivan, her colleague in the Senate. It'll be interesting to see whether that makes a difference.
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A
Also, we'll see if we can get her back on the podcast to talk about that race. We got a question from David, who asks, is there any data on how the public perceive ICE pertaining to approval, trust, et cetera? If so, has this changed during the second Trump presidency and since the awful Minnesota news? This is. You know, we generally say that we need at least two weeks for the public to price in new information. It has not even been, I think, a full week or barely been a full week at the time that we're talking about this. But what does the polling show so far?
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B
Yeah, so we got a Quinnipiac poll, for example, that was in the field between January 8th and January 12th, and that showed that ICE had a disapproval rating of 57% versus an approval rating of 40%. The partisan split was exactly what you'd imagine. Republicans were sort of more likely to approve 84 to 12 versus Democrats were more likely to disapprove 4 to 94. So a very, very big partisan divide versus independents were more likely to disapprove 33 to 64, which is actually sort of a big difference than I would have expected. But what is interesting here is that it's basically unchanged from the July 16 Quinnipiac poll. So it doesn't really seem as if there's been a huge change. But to your point, I do think something like this needs some time in order to sort of people to understand what they saw here and sort of make up their mind. I will add though, that a large majority of people say that they have either seen the video itself or heard about the incident. So in that same poll, 82% of respondents said that they had seen a video of the incident, compared to 18% who said they had not. In a gov poll that was fielded in pretty much exactly the same time, 91% of people or respondents said that they had at least heard about it and 69% said that they had seen the video. Interestingly enough, in that poll, 46% of respondents said that they would be willing or would want to abolish ICE, compared to 43% which opposing the abolition of ICE. That is the first poll where YouGov asks this where abolishing ICE has a majority. They asked this previously in 2025, in 2019 and in 2018. But I went back and checked the 2025 poll, for example. Obviously Trump was already in office when this poll was filled. Only 27% wanted to abolish ICE. So clearly a huge jump amongst people who want to apologize. But at that time, 45% said no to abolishing ICE. So the sort of no, it's clearly been people who had no opinion or it looks likely that there was people who had no opinion who moved to the abolish ICE side versus the people who don't want to abolish ice. That group seems to be holding strong.
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A
Does that mean anything in particular in terms of how strong the opinions are against ice? Does that mean they're fluid or just what does that mean?
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B
Well, I think partially fluid and partially like we. I mean, look, this is not the first time we've seen this exact pattern play out. I mean this is true for like a lot of polls that fall into the Trump partisanship trap. I will say which is that, you know, a small majority of Americans will answer the question in a way that they oppose whatever the Trump administration is doing. And a very strong minority or a very high, like, large group, but sort of a slight minority supports what the Trump administration is doing. We see that time and time again in basically any kind of poll, starting from 2016, probably 2015 onwards. And that is true here, too. And so it'll be obviously interesting to see as this, I mean, this is an ongoing storyline and so it'll be interesting to see whether anything else happens that is able to change it in this particular case. But generally speaking, this has been a pattern that we have seen be pretty strong and consistent over the last 10 years.
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A
Okay, so to David's question, it seems like the public's approval or trust in ICE is down significantly. I wanted to look at a bit of the broader picture as well, which is what do Americans think about Trump's handling of immigration? His net approval right now is negative 8, which is not good, but it's better than his overall approval of net negative 12. I'll say it'll take, and this is according to Silver Bulletin, it'll probably take more time for if that is going to decline for it to get priced in because it's a rolling average. So it just takes longer for those numbers to change. Importantly as well, that is down quite a bit from when he started. So when Trump first took office, his approval on immigration net approval was plus 11. So a pretty big fall, but it's been relatively stable since last July. So from inauguration to last summer, there was a precipitous decline in his approval of basically every issue, including immigration. On immigration, he's been underwater by seven to eight points ever since. You don't see a lot of fluctuation, even as a lot of news about ICE enforcement crackdowns have entered the public realm. But if we are looking for some other movement on the immigration story, I think that the Gallup numbers of the most important issue facing the country tell an interesting story. So by, you know, early 2024, this is peak dissatisfaction with the Biden administration, 28% of Americans said that immigration was the most important issue facing the country. And that was rivaling the number of Americans who said it was the economy. I think it was 30% of Americans said the economy was the most important issue. By this past fall, it fell by 50%, down to just 14% of Americans who said that immigration was the biggest issue facing the country. So a lot of Americans concerns, I think about illegal immigration had subsided. In December, it rose to 19%. Now, I don't know if this is just sort of quirkiness of the surveys or if we are going to see the numbers of Americans saying that immigration is a most important issue rise, but with a different set of voters. You know, in the. In 2020, in early 2024, the people who are saying that immigration is the most important issue, I think, are quite clearly people who are concerned about the influx at the border, are concerned about illegal immigration as a problem. I wonder. And this is going to sort of frustrate tracking this poll a little bit, because we need to ask more questions to understand what is really motivating people. I wonder if we're going to start to see more people say that immigration is an important issue for them, but it's because they're concerned with ICE crackdowns. You know, we're hearing a lot about this story. I still think it is, like, quite a significant leap to get to large numbers of Americans saying that it's the most important issue to them. I think it's probably a subset of the Democratic Party, a more sort of, like, liberal wing of the Democratic Party, who are going to say that this is more important to them than, you know, the economy or government competency and things like that.
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B
I totally agree. And I think we've already been seeing some of that happen, that there exists a large chunk of sort of Democratic voters or Democratic supporters who are now saying that immigration is a top issue, basically because they are concerned with the ongoing crackdown that is happening by the administration. I will also say there's another thing. A large chunk of voters said that immigration was the largest issue, like you said, 28%, it went down to 14%. Now it's back up to 19%. But the number that said that the economy is the most important issue went from, like, I don't know, 30% up to, like, 35% or something like that. So part of this is obviously that, you know, a lot of people who thought that immigration was a big issue were sort of satisfied with Trump's election, with the policy changes that came with that, especially sort of early on, and said that it is no longer a big issue. But part of the other thing is that, you know, the economy continued to be a large issue.
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A
We got a set of questions along the lines of, clearly Democrats are upset about what's happening, whether it's their most important issue or not. And we got a couple questions along the lines of, you know, one question is, should the Democrats shut the government down to try to rein in ice. Of course, there's a deadline at the end of the month for passing more spending bills. Currently, Homeland security funding is being considered, which ICE is a part of. So maybe Democrats could make some threats there. Ben also asked the question, do you think there is any kind of opportunity for Democrats to make a statement at the coming State of the Union, for example, getting up and walking out en masse? Is there any evidence that the State of the Union impacts public opinion? I will say, Ben, no, I don't think there's any evidence that the State of the Union impacts public opinion.
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B
But on my, my ongoing list of things that journalists care about that no one else cares about, the State of the State of the Union isn't even on that list anymore because I feel like a lot of journalists don't care.
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About it anymore, don't even care about it anymore. I guess the question is this is in many ways a strategic question that I don't feel equipped to answer per se. I still would have a difficult time imagining that the marginal voter, as in like not the person who's already in Democrats camp, is more concerned about this than, for example, healthcare costs or what have you. But maybe the shooting of Renee Goode changes things. I mean that's, you know, we talk about how video evidence really is what can change people's opinion. And we saw in the polling that it did change folks opinions. And so immigration enforcement, strong border security, deporting people who are in the country illegally and deporting people who are in the country illegally, particularly with criminal records, is one set of questions approving of maybe ICE under the Trump administration becomes a different set of questions that could, I don't know, upset or turn off a group of voters that is otherwise in favor of more hawkish immigration enforcement.
- [18:52]
B
I think that's right. I want to go back to what you said early on when we started talking about this, which is like we are in the middle of something happening. We are in the middle of sort of changes happening. We're in the middle of public opinion shift possibly, or at least there is some evidence for this. And so, you know, we should regroup again in a week or two. I will also say that there are ongoing videos, videos happening, ongoing videos get published. And obviously when someone gets shot, that creates a particular amount of attention. But a lot of these other videos, you know, it's sort of a, I don't know if it's going to call it a slow drip, but like a steady stream of videos that might show things, tactics by ICE and Border Patrol that most Americans might oppose, and therefore we'll just have to wait and see whether those also have an impact. I mean, this. We just have to continue reporting on this and continue reporting on public opinion as the story evolves.
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A
We got one kind of wonky question that I'll just bring up here quickly before we move on to foreign affairs. But Maung asks, with the ongoing ICE raids and the number of people being impacted by them, has polling data shown that there is a shift in the number of respondents of non white voters? And are polling organizations already having to shift their data to predict upcoming polls? I think the question is, do people who might feel targeted by ICE raids not answer pollsters now because they're afraid? I'll take a first crack at this question. You can tell me what you think, but obviously all right, that's the end of today's preview. Head over to GDPolitics.com to become a paid subscriber and listen to the full episode. Lenny and I spent about an hour answering your questions. We talked about Americans reactions to the prospect of military action in Iran and how Americans are thinking about other ongoing conflicts. One listener had a question about whether they're shaping how Americans view authoritarianism and socialism, and that answer got pretty interesting. And we talked about the Fed and politicization of the Department of Justice. Just some light listening for you, but in all seriousness, it's a worthwhile listen. Like I said, head over to GDPolitics.com to become a paid subscriber and catch the whole thing. Paid subscribers get about twice the number of episodes, can join in the paid subscriber chat, and most importantly, keep this podcast going. Also, it'll be worthwhile in 2026. We got a lot planned in the run up to the midterms. When you become a subscriber, you can connect your account to wherever you listen to podcasts so you'll never miss an episode. There's a link in the show Notes explaining how. Again, head over to GDPolitics.com see you there.