California's Senate Primary Is Going To Be A Doozy
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Nate, what kind of stove do you use for the cocktails? Is there at least egg white in the cocktails? No. Dude, comparative advantage, man. My comparative advantage does not come from cooking. Okay, but like you're a human being who grew up eating and like presumably at some point in your life, you were in a situation where you had to make your own food. Why would that situation occur?

What do you mean? Like, you can't cook one thing? Have you ever cooked an omelet? No. Rice and beans? No. A pancake? No. I don't like pancakes. All right, fair enough. I guess I have to believe that you've never cooked in your life. I have in my life, but like very, very rarely. What did you make? Ramen noodles.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. I hope everyone enjoyed the long weekend. We've got a mix of some serious and perhaps not so serious topics for you today. First, over the weekend, the White House issued a statement saying that five more pages of classified information were found at President Biden's home in Wilmington, Delaware. This is in addition to the documents found at his think tank and in his garage.

Last week, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate the situation. Comparisons to former President Trump's own possession of classified documents or even Hillary Clinton's private email server come easy. But are they apt? We're going to discuss.

Also last week, one of the most intriguing 2024 primaries began in earnest. No, we're not talking about for president, but the Democratic nomination for Senate in California. Representative Katie Porter announced she's running for Senator Dianne Feinstein's seat, despite the fact that Feinstein hasn't said she's retiring. Representatives Adam Schiff, Barbara Lee and Ro Khanna are also considering their own runs for the seat.

But before we get to any of that, we have to talk about the most important debate of the past week, which is gas stoves. After a Biden administration official suggested and then walked back the idea that gas stoves could be banned, stoves became another casualty in the culture war.

So why are these kinds of debates so seductive? Do people who don't live on the internet actually care about them? And most importantly, is Biden going to take away my gas stove? Here to talk about it all, our editor-in-chief, Nate Silver. Hey, Nate. Hey, everybody. Happy birthday, by the way. Oh, thank you. Happy birthday. You're one year older. Did you celebrate? How was it? I'm one year younger, actually.

Oh, okay. That's how it works. Yeah. You have the Benjamin Button disease. You're over the hill, so now you're decreasing in age. Peaked at 44 last year, now back down to 43. Well, congratulations. 45, I didn't know the actual age. That's a big year, Nate. Okay, let's move on.

Also here with us is editor and California politics expert extraordinaire, Maya Swidler. Hey, Maya. Hey, Galen. And also here with us is senior elections analyst, Nathaniel Rakich. Hey, Nathaniel. Hey, Galen. How's it going? It's going really well. I really love this new sort of super cheery introduction that you've given to yourself. It's a lovely change for 2023. Exactly. It was my New Year's resolution, Galen. I love that. To be nicer to you.

To be nice to me on the podcast. Yeah, just on the podcast. To be clear, in real life, everybody is still shot and gated. Savage. Behind the scenes, absolutely savage. Let's begin on, as I mentioned, a lighter note, especially if your igniter isn't working. Okay, anyway. Wow. I just, I had to.

In an interview, U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. said that as a result of harmful indoor air pollutants from gas stoves, quote, any option is on the table. Products that can't be made safe can be banned.

Republican lawmakers suggested this is an example of government overreach. People defended the culinary usefulness of gas stoves on the internet, and the agency later clarified that it is not actually looking to ban gas stoves. But this debate sort of took on a life of its own last week. And so I have to ask, Nate, kick us off, why was everyone talking about gas stoves on the internet? Like, what about this was so seductive? So I have a secret.

to reveal, which is that not all news weeks are equally full of actual news. And there's nothing going on after the speakership battle was resolved. It's the new year, right? People have time on their hands, right? So they debate stupid shit

That's why. So this is your media criticism hat. I mean, there was still stuff going on. Like the AG appointed a special counsel to look at the classified documents found at Biden's home. That's in the same category. That's in the same. I think there is actually. Nobody cares about. Share that analysis. At least Gastel's is fun. In the next segment. At least Gastel's is what? At least it's fun. I mean, we have George Santos. It's a fun news. That's Biden has restored normalcy. We're debating stupid again.

I guess that's fair. But like, what about gas stoves is fun to debate on the internet? Like, is there something more here than just it was a slow news week? Or does this get at something that actually exists in the culture when it comes to politics? I mean, I think it gets at like kind of a nudgy progressive culture of risk aversion, right? I mean, I think it's one thing it gets at. What was like the Trim Cook quote? He's like, well,

If it causes risk, then we can ban it or something like that. Right. So I think it kind of touches on that and might serve as a proxy for, frankly, more important debates like how the U.S. responded to COVID or maybe how you deal with risk in financial markets and things like that. But no, it's kind of a convenient place where like it's easy to make fun of the libs for this. And I think that's why it became like a touchstone. OK, Maya, do you agree?

Yeah, I mean, it's adjacent enough to a lot of the conversations we're having about the environment and the role of personal choice and kind of like broader governmental action. But it's so, so low stakes. Like, no one's actually trying to take action on this. There are small municipalities who have floated it. You know, Kathy Hochul in New York kind of made some noise about it and then backed off. Like, nothing's going to happen. We're all just kind of going to discourse over it for a while until something more exciting comes up. Yeah, I mean, like...

The way I described it is like, you know, two weeks ago before all this kerfuffle happened, like if you were in like the writer's room in SNL and you wanted to write a parody of like a Republican culture war, you would come up with something like gas stoves, I feel like, which is it's just like silly, right? Like.

Why would this have been a big issue? When we think about culture wars, we think about things like guns or abortion or sexual orientation or things that are actually already in the discourse. At least for me personally, I was not aware that there was any kind of question about banning gas stoves, which apparently there isn't, before last week. And yet it kind of

blew up into this thing. And despite it not really being, I don't see how it kind of threatens the conservative way of life the way that a lot of these other culture war issues do. In fact, if you look at the statistics, the states that are more likely to have gas stoves are blue states like New York and California. And there's actually the kind of higher up you go on the income ladder, which granted, we talk about the education divide, and that's not exactly the same as the income divide.

But like it tends to be wealthier households that have gas stoves. And maybe that's why, right? Like a lot of Republican politicians and also Joe Manchin who like, you know, kind of present themselves as like working class, you know, heroes, but actually many of whom are quite wealthy and elite. And maybe they have gas stoves and they don't want their gas stoves to be taken away. I don't know. It was just very kind of like absurdist in the kind of, you know, surrealism sense to me.

So part of the fun in all of this for the data nerds out there was that people actually went and dug up a bunch of statistics about who owns gas stoves according to region and income and all sorts of things. And it turns out that about 40% of Americans have gas stoves and they're concentrated in the Northeast. In fact, electric stoves are almost ubiquitous in the South. Like 90% of Southern homes have electric stoves. California, as you mentioned, was another high gas stove state.

And like the income distribution is pretty even across incomes. Like renters are actually more likely to have gas stoves, for example. But then when you do reach like the highest 10% of the income distribution, it really shoots up to a lot of, you know, the highest income earners having gas stoves. So in case anyone was actually curious about that data, but it gets at something else too. Like, yes, it gets at,

Everything that people have mentioned here, sort of like risk aversion and government overreach or whatever. But I think there is also a question, a broader question of how willing people are to make changes to their lives to respond to climate change.

And yes, this is one that's like a little weird and mostly presented as like a pollution in the home type thing and related to questions about asthma. But it is also like the use of gas ultimately does come back to climate change as well. And as these debates happen about, you know,

Changing people's homes, insulating things, creating a green economy, electrifying the country, etc. Like conversations about, you know, how much meat we eat also come up because I suspect that those will keep coming up in the political discourse. How popular are those kinds of sort of personal everyday sacrifices politically?

So the Yale Climate Communications Program came out with a survey somewhat recently that said that about half of Americans say they have deliberately purchased an energy-efficient kitchen appliance. It doesn't necessarily go into the scale, but it does seem like

some people when they're updating or retrofitting their kitchens do have this in mind. Now, would that extend to large appliances that tend to be more expensive like stoves? Unclear. Yeah, I was going to say, Galen, I don't think you have a good career in politics in front of you because you used the word sacrifice there, right? If people feel like they have to sacrifice something, it's very different than if they feel like it's a win-win or they feel like they're taking their own –

initiative to spend a little bit more or sacrifice, there I said it myself, or trade off other product features for more environmentally friendly features. So it's the kind of heavy-handed approach that tends to incite a backlash.

Is that distinct about our politics in this era that you can't ask people to make a sacrifice for the good of the whole? Like, wasn't American politics at one point rooted in a sort of puritanical, Protestant, sort of like, you sacrifice today to reap the benefits tomorrow kind of attitude? Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Like, is that just...

Was that ever popular? Literal. And it just isn't now? Literal, LOL. I mean, give me a break. We're not like some harmonious country like Canada or something, right? Like Canada? We got to get Kaylee on here to respond to that. We saw this in COVID that we're an extremely individualistic country. Trying to graph notions of the collective good on an extremely individualist country is going to

Create problems potentially and so the way that you know, the way that we get around stuff is by having kind of economic Solutions that create price incentives basically, right? Maybe you offer a discount or a tax cut on Electric stoves so that's kind of how you or you haven't attacks on gas stoves, right? That's uh, let's say you kind of nudge policy forward instead of like banning things

In fact, I think the Inflation Reduction Act gives people monetary incentives. I think it's something like $850 to buy, you know, to electrify their stoves. So, okay, this brings me to a final question here. It seems that it keeps happening within the Democratic Party that

will take a position. It can sometimes be a controversial opinion, oftentimes may not have majority support in public opinion polling. And in this case, I can actually sort of cite the polling when YouGov asked Americans whether or not they support banning gas stoves.

Around 40% said they strongly or somewhat support. Around 40% said they somewhat or strongly oppose. And 20% said they were not sure. Yeah, it was actually more even than I would have thought. I was surprised at that. Yeah, I don't know. A lot of people didn't know. I don't really trust this polling system.

I'm not really sure. A lot of people didn't seem to have strong, a lot of people were like, I guess I somewhat oppose that. I guess I somewhat support that. So that was, it was interesting. Yeah, people didn't really seem to know what to do with it. It wasn't super polarizing, even though it ended up being 40-40. Yeah, but in any case, instead of oftentimes mainstream Democrats, instead of arguing with progressives and saying, no, we disagree with your policy position. We don't want that. Instead, they will sort of say publicly, express to the media, et cetera,

It's not actually a position like no one's actually saying we're going to ban gas stoves. No one actually is saying that we should take your gas stoves away. But then the whole week on the Internet, you actually see progressive politicians and people saying, no, we should ban gas stoves. Gas stoves are bad. And here's all the reasons we should ban them. And it's this weird dynamic that actually keeps coming up in the Democratic Party where progressives will take.

a sort of controversial position on something. I mean, this happened during sort of debates over race in response to George Floyd's killing in 2020, to some extent, and debates over like abolishing ICE and decriminalizing crossing the border. And like progressives take these strong positions and then Democrats, instead of arguing against them, will say, no, no one's really arguing for that. We don't actually want that. So why does this dynamic keep happening in the Democratic Party? Like why are mainstream Democrats fighting

sort of insisting that these debates aren't happening as opposed to engaging with them and sort of arguing their own position. I mean, are the mainstream Democrats insisting the debates aren't happening or are they just like criticizing the progressives? Right. I mean, because I feel like this is all. So it's definitely true that you'll have progressive positions that half the progressives will say, no, this is a straw man. We're not really arguing for it. And the other half will say, actually,

This thing is good, right? You know, like defund the police was sometimes used as a straw man, but there were actually people who like literally meant let's substantially reduce funding for the police, right? I mean, look, to me, it seems pretty simple, which is that if you have an unpopular politically combustible

idea that you try to like kind of pretend that you don't have that idea or pretend that you do depending on who's in the room and who's listening. It's like, it's pretty common. I think I'm sure it occurs on, um, on the right too. Right. Where they'll say, oh, we just actually believe in free speech. Now the left doesn't anymore, but then you have, you know, Ron DeSantis trying to strongly regulate what you can teach in Florida or something. So it's like, it's just a very kind of common form of political inconsistency and, um,

hypocrisy and dishonesty, but I don't think the left has a monopoly on it in particular.

Yeah. Maya and Nathaniel, do you agree with that? Like, why wouldn't mainstream Democrats engage in an actual debate as opposed to saying this debate isn't really happening? People don't actually have this position. I mean, I think it's just a different form of like political dialectic, right? Like it's not them taking two different positions and meeting in the middle. It's basically trying to avoid having this debate in the first place, which is a way of kind of finding a resolution, you know, in

In a back room, for example, like look at the rollout of the Green New Deal and how that kind of went down across the Democratic Party. That to me seems like the closest analogy to like one path that this could take. Yeah, that's a good point. I think back, Galen, to as a conversation I think you had last year with somebody about wedge issues. Right. And I think that, you know, basically the simple answer is that, you know, this would be a wedge issue within the Democratic Party. And so it's not surprising that like Democratic elites don't want to talk about it.

Yeah, when you have a dynamic where like, let's say 60% of your coalition favors a particular stand, right? So a majority, but not an overwhelming one, there is dissent, right? And almost nobody outside the coalition likes it very much. Like, this is some of the debates over kind of a broad category of things you might consider wokeness or political correctness, right? There are people who consider themselves leftists or liberals or Democrats who

object to it. Probably a majority of people in the Democratic coalition mostly support those ideas, right? But like, they're not terribly popular outside that world. And so you kind of get into these nasty arguments where, um,

I think the people who are kind of more centrist within the Democratic coalition sometimes argue against things on the basis that all these ideas are unpopular, but actually they don't like them either. Right. And they kind of use like unpopularity as like a, as like a guise for like more substantive objections. Even if they're correct about the unpopularity part, which I think sometimes people are in denial about, that's not the actual reason why they're arguing in some cases.

All right. So look, I forced you guys to have a serious conversation about a silly topic. I'll consider that a win on my part. Now we're going to talk about it. That was all the fun we're having this podcast. Now we got to talk about more serious stuff. Sorry, guys. California Senate isn't fun. It's pretty fun. Come on, Galen. We can have some fun there. But let's talk about Biden's classified documents.

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Here is a quick timeline of what we know about Biden's possession of classified documents from the Obama administration. On November 2nd, Biden's lawyers found a small number of classified documents at Biden's Washington think tank and reported them to the National Archives that day. The National Archives retrieved the documents and referred the matter to the Department of Justice.

On December 20th, Biden's lawyers told the U.S. attorney conducting a preliminary assessment that they found another set of classified documents in storage at Biden's home in Wilmington. Over the weekend, this past weekend, the White House said five more pages were found at the home, and last week, the attorney general appointed a special counsel to look into the matter. There are, I'm sure, more details, but that's a rough bullet point list of what has happened so far.

We're going to go around the table. Nate, how significant of a political scandal is this? I think once upon a time we awarded Mueller's as a measure of scandal during the Trump administration. How many Mueller's are you awarding the Biden classified documents discovery? Unless there's something much more salacious in these documents or interesting that's been reported so far, I think it's like one half toenail of a Mueller. Really? Nobody...

Is the scale Mueller's toe to Mueller's head? It's just one Mueller. Is it more than one Mueller or is it just one Mueller body? What scale are you working with, Nate? The common sense, I mean, people who are disinclined to dislike Joe Biden will dislike Joe Biden and find Democrats to be hypocrites, right? But like a classified document scandal that doesn't seem particularly detailed or solid, I just think people's eyes glaze over.

Like nobody who's not like a political junkie gets to talk about this. And that will change if there's some like, oops, if you have some nuclear secrets or something. Sure. Okay. But it's just kind of the kind of thing that makes people's like, I mean, you know, Biden also, his numbers, I'm like, are you seen as honest and trustworthy are pretty close to his overall numbers, maybe a point or two better. Right. But I just think that this is like, and also like, it's going to get lost in a whole series of Republican congressional debates.

house-led investigations. And so people will have trouble distinguishing any like noise from signal anyway. But this is a slow Newsweek story, I think. Wait, so you're saying his honesty and trustworthy numbers are about where his overall numbers are. His overall numbers are 44% approval rating, which is up notably from, you know, where he was over the summer, for example, which was like 37%, or even where he was going into the midterms, which was closer to 42%.

So are you saying that like honesty and trustworthy is an asset that Biden has that he risks losing or like people are more inclined to believe him and trust him or that he isn't? People don't really think he's honest. I'm saying the story. It doesn't make a difference. I'm saying the story. It doesn't matter. You're just saying it doesn't matter. OK. As currently as currently reported, I want to reserve the big caveat that like, you know, if there are unreported details that are more interesting. If they find a Mueller foot, like a whole foot as opposed to just half a toenail.

Then it's a foot, not just a toe nail. Maya, do you agree? I do. As long as it stays in the realm of a political problem and doesn't become a legal one, like it doesn't seem to be a whole lot of there there. Like what I kind of wonder is if Trump hadn't had a similar issue over the summer and there hadn't been subpoenas and there hadn't been like boxes found in Mar-a-Lago, would we be having this conversation today?

if we didn't have like something analogous to compare it to. And while the Republicans will make, you know, as much conversation around the hypocrisy of Biden in this situation, if the opportunity to claim hypocrisy wasn't there, would we have this conversation? Well, I mean, we do have the sort of Hillary Clinton private email server as an example of

Republicans and the press making a big deal out of something, even when there was no sort of analogous situation on the Republican side, perhaps. But you said something I think that's important. You said as long as this remains a political scandal and not a legal one. Can you explain what you mean there and like the distinction between what could make this a legal scandal versus a political scandal?

Sure. I mean, I think a lack of cooperation from the Biden side, if subpoenas are issued, if, you know, the Justice Department gets more involved, if this becomes kind of broader than just the Biden team handing documents over or if there has to be some sort of involvement from the legal side or the DOJ, that becomes, I think, a little bit closer to the foot, I guess. We'd be moving past the big toe kind of into the metatarsals.

Like, in other words, the reason that this was a legal issue for Trump is because he didn't cooperate with the Department of Justice. Yes.

you know specifically with trump you know there were kind of multiple junctures at which he didn't cooperate right he the national archives contacted him in in biden's case you know they discovered the documents and they contacted the national archives but in trump's case the national archives contacted him said hey we think some stuff is missing they kind of had a long back and forth there was a a subpoena issued then trump's team gave over stuff and said yep this is everything and then turns out nope it wasn't everything and that's why the fbi had to to raid mar-a-lago

And that obviously, you know, yeah, as Maya mentioned, that creates a legal issue for Trump that isn't present there with Biden. And obviously that's a big difference in the story. I think, so Galen, can you clarify with the Mullers, is this like,

That's a good question. Right. Like, how...

How sort of morally bad is this versus how does this shape politics? I think we never distinguished, but please feel free to create two different measurements if you would like. And I would encourage you to share your analysis on both.

I guess I would rate it about the same on both scales. I guess I'm the most hawkish one on the panel. I think it's not a good scandal. Classified information should be handled properly. There should be consequences when it is not.

I think that is true. I just also think that you obviously have to have nuance in this case because like you have this scandal from Biden, which I think is bad, but the Trump one, which is much worse on many levels for the reasons that we've already discussed. And because those two things exist in the same kind of news ecosphere, you know, we in the media have to be careful about how we cover them. And to some extent, it does mean kind of like

adding on all these caveats to the Biden case, which maybe wouldn't be there if the Trump case wasn't there. And I don't personally think that the Biden scandal should be diminished, but there shouldn't be a false equivalency

you know, and I'll be, I think we'll talk about the kind of media coverage of it a little bit later. Um, in terms of how it's perceived, um, yeah, I think we're obviously very early in on this. A lot of it is going to depend on the media coverage. If it is kind of a sustained thing, kind of the, the Hillary's emails thing is, is kind of the, the shining example of, you know, of the media overreacting to a story like this. And if this gets dragged through, you know, if

Biden runs again and it continues to, you know, be an issue in 2024 unless things, you know, like if it evolves, you know, I guess that's one thing. But like this shouldn't be the kind of thing that is kind of continuously brought up as a what about to Trump's various scandals if Trump is even the nominee or DeSantis or whoever it is.

And in terms of like right now, we actually don't have any polls that have asked about this scandal yet. So I don't know. I tend to agree with Nate and Maya that it probably won't really matter because the people who care about it are going to be people who already hate Joe Biden. But it is interesting. We've seen Biden's approval rating tick up a little bit in recent months. Maybe this halts that in its tracks. I don't know. But a lot, I think, will depend on the media coverage.

Well, the media coverage and also context that we don't know. Of course, Nate, you said that...

whatever the documents are will have some bearing on how much of a Mueller you consider this to be. But like the thing that's illegal is willfully doing this, right? So, you know, does this, I guess in Americans' minds seem plausible that this is the kind of document that you may accidentally take to your think tank offices or to the storage in your garage or whatever. And also as far as crimes actually go, intent is always difficult to prove as we've talked about a million times as relates to Trump scandals on this podcast. And,

But regardless of the intent part, what is the actual document? In this case, I think that this has famous last words.

has more of a possibility of being resolved in the public's mind than Hillary Clinton's private email server ever did. Because there was a lot of like, well, we don't really know. The emails are no longer there. They were all deleted. Like, you know, there was a big sort of like data dump at one point, but there was a lot of the power of suggestion of some sort of corruption. I assume that in this case, and part of the reason that Biden's team has been so forthcoming is because they want

there to be like no power of suggestion here that we will find out what the documents were and it will sort of

Americans will be able to make up their mind and maybe put this to rest in a way that that like Clinton scandal was not able to be put to rest. That's like the nuts and bolts portion. The media coverage will also matter. And so I do want to ask you, Nate, like during the 2016 election and in the postmortem of how the 2016 election was covered, I think you came to the conclusion that how the Clinton email scandal was covered in the press and also, of course,

covered by the FBI or reacted to by the FBI caused Hillary Clinton the election. Do you see any parallels in sort of how the media is covering this so far? And like, what, what were your takeaways from that experience? I think in part because of how Hillary was covered, um, it changes media coverage a fair bit and the media is much more reluctant to, um, to give credit. I mean, you kind of saw an example of this with the, um,

Hunter Biden story, laptop story, which was incorrectly suppressed in a way that frankly seems biased. But also it's like, hey, we're not going to be fooled again by Russian disinformation. You know, yeah, I feel like this is like something where the media will pretty actively examine its role. And that always kind of carries some downsides. If it feels like you're suppressing information in a partisan way, then you can have the so-called

Streisand effect where people pay more attention to it. So if there is kind of more of a there there, that could actually maybe hurt Biden and certainly hurt perception of the media. But if it is truly something minor, I don't think the media will blow it up in the same way that they would have a couple of years ago. Yeah, just to put some kind of, well,

and anecdotes on that. I think so far the media coverage has been pretty good about this. I've seen kind of multiple articles

from CBS News, which originally broke the story. They kind of put the Trump story into context within that article and said, you know, like, this is facially similar to the Trump scandal, but here are all the ways in which the Trump scandal is much worse. I thought they did a good job with that. The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN have all kind of done explainers, kind of like being like,

Let's compare the two cases and show why they are not the same, which I think was good. And then I've also got some numbers from closed captioning data of cable news. And the story, I searched for the word classified.

Um, and that seems to be a pretty good proxy for, for coverage of the issue. And, um, basically this, this issue or the word classified specifically peaked at 920 mentions on January 12th. Um, and just for context, like that is like a good amount of news coverage, which I think, you know, I think this is a story and it should be covered, but it is not like saturation level of news coverage. It, it,

You know, it's the kind of thing that, you know, you mentioned, you know, it's one of your stories that you go through on your kind of, you know, roundup of the news every half hour or whatever it is that these people do. And, you know, that's kind of been the level of coverage. And I agree.

That strikes me as the correct level. Again, there's a lot that we don't know, both about the story and its development and also about how is the media going to cover this a month from now, a year from now, which in many ways I think could be more impactful. But I think so far so good tentatively.

Yeah. Nate, something you said early on is that now the Republican-controlled House is going to be launching all kinds of investigations and trying to focus the public's attention on, you know, reasons that they think the public should dislike Biden in an attempt to

you know, hold the executive branch accountable, but also probably in attempt to also win future elections. There's different things that they're working with here. I think one of the things they said they wanted to focus on was the withdrawal from Afghanistan. They also want to focus on Hunter Biden's laptop. Presumably they'll also want to focus on this. Like, are there any, I guess, scandals during the Biden presidency so far that seem like they could be long-term politically damaging to him? I mean, I don't know.

The Hunter Biden stuff is the most salacious in that the details involve sex and drugs and that kind of thing. And suppose it overtures at bribery and so forth. It's awfully hard for Republicans to critique –

other people for like minor ethical violations when um donald trump was the previous republican president and is still the central figure in many ways of the republican party if a little bit less so than before so it's kind of more like fighting things to a draw hey your guy is corrupt too right your guy is no better than our guy um and maybe that kind of softens

images of trump it's kind of a lesser of two evils thing um but i don't think it particularly helps images of the republican party and i'm not sure that you know they wouldn't be better off like doing hearings on inflation or school closures or things like that where there's actual like more substance to be debated again i could be wrong people feel it sort of personally and yeah yeah but i think people kind of i mean and nor did like democratic like

Investigations of like Trump really seem to move the needle on Trump, right? Trump's firing Comey had an effect on the polls but otherwise like the Miller report if anything Trump's kind of approval ratings like rose a little bit after the Miller report was out you have the examples of Bill Clinton and Bill Clinton was much more popular after the GIP took over Congress in 1994 for the remaining six years He had an office

So, yeah, I'm not I'm I'm not convinced this is I mean, it's not one sided. Right. It's not like, oh, there's all this downside for Biden now that the GOP took over the House. Right. There is downside for both parties, especially with this kind of narrow GOP majority where a lot of concessions were made to the Freedom Caucus and so forth. And like, you know, the Freedom Caucus is not acting in the long term electoral interests of the GOP.

I mean, I wonder which path would be

best electorally for the GOP, if they want to pursue Biden on policy grounds and go after things like the economy or like immigration and kind of the route of impeaching Alejandro Mayorkas, which has come up, or if they want to go after Biden for him and his family's personal comportment, which this scandal would be Hunter Biden's laptop, all of that sort of thing. It feels like they don't theoretically have to choose, right? They have control of these committees. They could do both, but would doing both prevent one from breaking through?

Yeah, that's a good point. I guess we will see and we will be able to see how Americans respond as well. So as usual with these things, we will talk about it again in the future. Let's wrap up with the California Senate primary.

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As of last week, Representative Katie Porter is officially running for Dianne Feinstein's Senate seat in California. Feinstein hasn't actually announced that she is retiring at this point, and also plenty more Democratic politicians want in on the fun. So this is going to be a messy primary. Maya, why are these candidates either announcing or floating possible runs before Feinstein even retires?

So this is a little bit of a tricky issue to talk about. Dianne Feinstein has been in the Senate for a very, very long time. There have been questions about her cognitive decline over the last couple years. It's been covered in local media like the San Francisco Chronicle. It's broken out into national level publications.

It's something that I think people haven't quite figured out how to talk about, but it's clearly present both in the state and in the Senate. And I think she will be 91 at the time of the next election. There is an assumption that she won't run. And there are younger representatives on the back bench in California who are looking to advance and

and are kind of taking advantage of this fallow period in the news to make a statement. I think Katie Porter, most notably, and Barbara Lee, hasn't gone quite as public. I believe she only told the Congressional Black Caucus. But we should be definitely keeping an eye out for more announcements in the next couple weeks and months. I know you pay a lot of attention to this. You're from the Bay Area. As far as you're concerned, is it a foregone conclusion that Feinstein's retiring?

My gut says yes. But, you know, I could be wrong. Strong Thurman was 93 years old when he won his eighth and final term. She's a real institutionalist. She's got a very smart team behind her. Who knows? I mean, but come on. So, like, do you think she could win the primary if she did run?

We have to talk about what the California primary means, right? It's a jungle primary. So the top two vote getters will advance to the general election, regardless of party. I think on name recognition alone, she would be able to slide into the November general election at this point.

especially if the progressive lane is pretty crowded. Last time she won re-election, it was her and Kevin de Leon, also a Democrat who ran to her left, that were on that ballot in November. And he didn't face too much competition. Right now we're looking at two, potentially three candidates in the progressive lane. So I think she has a pretty good chance of advancing out of the primary. Now, would she receive the most votes? I don't know. That would surprise me a little bit more, to be honest. Mm-hmm.

We've mentioned here Barbara Lee, Katie Porter. I also mentioned at the start of the podcast Adam Schiff and Ro Khanna. Anyone else who's looking into getting in on this fun?

Some local reports have suggested Javier Becerra, who's currently the Secretary of Health and Human Services and was a longtime representative from the state. There's also Rob Bonta, who's the state's attorney general. Both of them haven't been in their positions very long. Both of them have won statewide positions, but it's unclear kind of like where, what their lanes would be. And I don't think either of them have leaked anything. So it's just speculation. But those are two other names that I've read.

Can we talk a little bit about the California electorate? California, popularly known as the left coast, you know, whatever, it's a liberal state. But like the politics are more complicated than that. There's a lot of variation in terms of race, income, education, and what people are motivated by politically, I think.

It's been described to me as like there's the pro-development part of the Democratic Party and the anti-development part of the Democratic Party in terms of like housing and infrastructure and things like that. And that like that's the main divide in California politics. There's the sort of standard progressive versus establishment. I think while it may be blue through and through, there are different ways of describing the cleavages in California. How would you describe them?

Sure. I mean, I think the descriptor that you used is most apt. It's a liberal state. It's certainly not a progressive one. And while it's comfortably elected Democrats to most federal and statewide positions by large margins over the last couple of years, if you look at some of the more progressive issues that have been on the back of the bill, it's not a progressive one.

particularly over the last decade, decade and a half, like local rent control initiatives, like certain economic issues, like reclassifying gig workers, like repealing split roll tax, eliminating cash bail. They're not passing. So this is a state that is totally happy to vote for fairly establishment Democrats, but won't often, at the statewide level at least, buck the trend.

And not to be like, oh, California has more Trump voters than any other state in the country. But like Trump got six million votes, right? Like there are Republicans who live in this state who do vote on ballot measures and will be voting in general elections, regardless of the parties of the two candidates on the on the ballot. And that I don't think should be missed in the fact that like they have had Democratic senators for 30 plus years and they have had, you know, sent Biden, you know, they gave their electoral votes to Biden by five million votes, that sort of thing.

It's also worth keeping in mind in California that in general, among Democrats, among Democrats, to be clear, not among the entire voter electorate, among Democrats, white Democrats tend to be more liberal and left wing and progressive than the non-white Democrats. And of course, in California, white Democrats tend to be more liberal and left wing and progressive than the non-white Democrats.

It's an extremely diverse state. You have a lot of Asian-American and Hispanic-American and Black-American and mixed American Democrats. A lot of first generation or even zero generation immigrants who are in the electorate. And yeah, those types of states, and New York is another one, tend to have these pragmatic kind of center left views.

sometimes slightly kind of NIMBY-ish coalitions that they build, where they're kind of liberal, democratic in national politics, but maybe not even so much in local politics. I mean, with that said, there are certainly all types of political traditions in California. California has been the originator of lots of

conservative political thought over the years. You obviously do have like a progressive tradition in parts of the state. So it's a multifaceted state, but yeah, it's kind of the, it's the wheeling and dealing kind of coalition building politicians that tend to succeed more than the kind of one note ideological kind of purists. With that in mind,

What should we make of the main candidates that have been mentioned here? Like, do any of them have a clear advantage? And we can be talking about two different things, sort of like who are the two that are going to make it to the general and who will ultimately win. But does anyone have an idea of like who has the best theory of the case? I would probably say Adam Schiff, assuming that Feinstein doesn't run. Um,

you know, he has a big national profile from being, um, the, from his role in, in Donald Trump's impeachment. Um, he also has $20 million just sitting in his congressional bank account, which seems clearly earmarked for a Senate race, considering that his, uh, house district is not competitive. And, and he, you know, he certainly also has the ability to, to, you know, there's more where that came from. Um,

Um, you know, and, and he, I think, you know, would kind of fill that establishment lane. Um, you know, he would inherit a lot of that, like Feinstein support. I think Katie Porter, of course, is more on the progressive side of things. Um, she is, uh, kind of a protege of Elizabeth Warren, who has already, uh, endorsed her. If that kind of gives you a sense of where she is on the

on the spectrum and kind of to Nate's point, you know, that kind of positions her as the candidate for white college educated progressives. But that probably isn't a super huge constituency.

Or, you know, it'll give her a floor, but, you know, probably not, you know, enough votes to, you know, maybe she makes it to the general election. But then kind of after that, the general election, side note, will be interesting if it's two Democrats against each other, because then who do the Republicans vote for? Yeah, I was going to say, if you have Katie Porter and Adam Schiff, who in the world are, like, that's not a situation where Adam Schiff being slightly more establishment is going to sort of help him win Republican votes. They have no love for Adam Schiff. Right.

So I'm not sure they would be like, oh, yeah, he's less progressive than Katie Porter. But but yeah, but then the other interesting thing is that Porter and Schiff are both from Southern California. I think there's definitely a lane for a Northern California candidate. That would be Barbara Lee if she gets in the race. It would also be Ro Khanna. You know, and so it could matter whether there's one major NorCal candidate or two.

Um, Barbara Lee is interesting too, because she is progressive. Um, but she's kind of been, she's like an OG progressive. She has been in Congress for a long time. She was the only member of Congress famously who voted against the authorization for the use of military force after nine 11. Um, and so she's kind of been in this contrarian, um,

place within the Republican or within the Democratic Party, sorry, since well before the whole, you know, kind of modern progressive movement began with with kind of Bernie Sanders as presidential campaign in 2016. She's also black, which is an interesting tension because black politicians and black voters tend to be more pragmatic. So it'll be interesting to see if she does run kind of which direction she runs in. And, you know, that could tell us a lot about, you know, what people perceive the winning strategy in California to be.

Yeah, the regional thing seems important, in part because if you get to a runoff, Southern California is a bit more populous than Northern California. And the L.A. media market's a bit larger than the Bay Area media market. So that might help shift or porter, I guess, if one or two of them were to emerge in the final two.

What's interesting is I feel like there has been a pretty major shift in the nexus of political power kind of down towards Southern California in the last couple of years. We went from having Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer and DiFi kind of representing the vanguard of the old California leaders, and now we have...

You know, Gavin Newsom, who is associated with San Francisco. Nancy Pelosi. Nancy Pelosi stepping down right and Alex Padilla and a lot of these kind of like larger named California figures representing the state specifically are from Southern California. Kamala Harris being in the vice presidency kind of was one of the precursors to that shift.

I don't know if Southern California would care about that. I don't know if most voters in Northern California would care about that, frankly. But it is something that I've been watching over the last couple of years and kind of wondering what that means for the state as it confronts new challenges. So given everything we've said in terms of positioning within the Democratic Party and geography and race, et cetera, Maya, do you have thoughts on who the strongest candidates are in the Democratic primary? Yeah.

I think Porter and Schiff right now are probably best positioned to capture more votes. What's interesting about the four districts that these four potential candidates represent is that they're all dramatically, dramatically different. And frankly, none of them are particularly representative of the state's voting age population writ large. Ro Khanna and Barbaralee's districts, the 12th and the 17th, are among the

the 10 wealthiest congressional districts in the country. Uh, Connors district is the only majority Asian district in the contiguous United States. Adam shifts is more than 50% white. Um, and is the only, I think urban district of the four of them. The rest are considered urban suburban. Katie Porters is the only district that, that approaches the approximate share of Hispanic and black, um,

residents that the state does. I don't know if that means anything. Like most of them do tend to have kind of more national fundraising profiles, particularly Porter and Schiff. And Khanna has definitely been getting himself out there and touring the Midwest in the lead up to the last couple of elections, trying to kind of pitch himself as a policy wonk for the 21st century. But it's hard to see based on these like very limited samples of their congressional districts, what their actual base looks like, if that makes sense.

Right. Interestingly, also, Katie Porter comes from the most competitive district and has had to do theoretically the most to attract moderate slash Republican voters, even though her politics are more in the progressive lane. Like,

Does she sort of run, I don't know, like what does that campaign look like? Does she try to continue to capitalize on her success in a purple district and try to woo Republicans slash independents at all while also pitching a more sort of populist economic message? Oh, that's a good point. What was that, Nate? Sorry, I didn't, could you say that a little louder? I mean, you're probably going to have, well, not for sure. There's a good chance that you'll have two Democrats in the runoff as you did last

In 2018, I think was the last time that Feinstein ran. Yeah, and I don't know that Katie Porter is going to appeal to very many independent voters at all. I think it's a disadvantage for her in a runoff. Interesting. Interesting. Closing thoughts, anyone? We are going to come back to this topic, of course, but before we go. I predict that this will be the most

annoying non-presidential primary in the history of the United States. Worse than Massachusetts Senate in 2020? That one was bad. Oh, yeah. It's going to be pricey. It's going to be... That's just homestead bias. It's Massachusetts. It's going to be what? It's going to be very expensive. Just don't look at the bottom line. It's going to be real. It's so much money. Is the primary going to be more expensive than the general? Well, it depends on if they're two Democrats.

I mean, there's more candidates, right? So. Yeah. Have any Republicans said that they're running yet?

Not that I've seen. Have you seen any, Nathaniel? According to Wikipedia, there is one declared Republican candidate, educator Denise Gary Pandol. And she is not a household name, to put it politely. So no prominent Republicans have announced. But I do. I mean, I think maybe people are underrating the possibility that, you know, if there's one rich guy Republican who gets in the race and can, you know, kind of work out, you

You're right. Yes. Sorry. You can amass 20, 25 percent of the vote. You know, they can get into the November election and then obviously it would be a walk for whoever the Democrat is. But, you know, yeah, they're you know, all it would take is the Republican Party not to be fractured a million ways, which, you know, hasn't been the case in some past elections. But it's it's it's definitely possible that a Republican could advance. The bar won't be that high with with so many Democrats in the running, probably. All right. Well,

Given what Nate said about this being the quote, most annoying primary in American history, we're definitely going to have to talk a lot more about it. We'll leave it there for today, though. Thank you, Maya, Nate, and Nathaniel. Thank you, guys. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Gavin.

Love it, Nathaniel. Thank you, Brian. My name is Dylan Drew. Tony Chow is in the virtual control room and Chadwick Matlin is our editorial director. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening and we will see you soon. Bye.