Live From D.C. … This Is Model Talk
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Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. Nate Silver. And this is Model Talk. And in fact, this is Model Talk live from Washington, D.C. Election Day is just two weeks away, and we're recording one of our final Model Talk episodes of this election, along with 600 friends of the pod at Sixth and I in Washington, D.C.,

Yeah! There we go. It is our first time back in front of a live audience since January of 2020. And in fact, this is exactly where we were in January of 2020, our last live show.

Pre-pandemic was here at 6th and I. So I wanted to start off by saying a big thank you to everyone who's here tonight. Being together in person like this is really nice, and you, the audience, are what make it what it is. So give yourselves a big round of applause. And of course, a special hello to those of you who are joining virtually, like my grandmother. Hi, Grandma.

It's great to have all of you with us as well. So like I said, Election Day is just two weeks away. It's an election that's seeing record levels of voter enthusiasm in the polls. It comes after the Supreme Court's historic decision to overturn Roe v. Wade amid 40-year high inflation and as some politicians continue to cast doubt on the legitimacy of American elections altogether. Tonight we're going to talk about all of it.

For those of you who aren't familiar, Model Talk is the part of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast where we talk about the numbers behind the FiveThirtyEight forecast. At the time of this recording, those numbers are as follows: Democrats have a 55% chance of keeping control of the Senate, and Republicans have an 81% chance of winning the House. The governor's races are currently toss-ups in Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Oregon.

And since this is a live show, I'll give you a sense of how this is all going to work. We more or less treat this like a regular podcast taping. You'll hear things that never make it into the final cut. Maybe some swearing, maybe a lengthy tangent. I don't know, I don't think that's something they would ever do. Only you here with us tonight will ever know what happened in this room tonight.

Later on in the show, we're also going to be joined by some special guests. We'll play a round of midterms trivia, and then we'll take some questions from the audience. So is everyone ready? Before we get to the state of the midterms here in the U.S., I do want to answer a really important listener question that we received from across the pond. Brett asks...

How does the model feel about the head of lettuce that predicted the end of Liz Truss? It seems that vegetable got worldwide attention for one correct off-the-cuff prediction. While the model sits in obscurity in a server room in Manhattan doing all the hard work. If I was the model, I would hate that head of lettuce with the heat of a thousand suns. I mean, the model has not hated anyone so much since Paul the Octopus in the World Cup.

For those of you who aren't familiar, this head of lettuce became famous after The Economist published the following quote: "Liz Truss blew up her own government with a package of unfunded tax cuts and energy price guarantees on September 23rd. Take away the 10 days of mourning after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, and she had seven days in control. That is roughly the shelf life of a lettuce." Serious question: is it easier to forecast political outcomes in Britain?

Oh, no. In fact, it's hard to even follow political outcomes in Britain because people are making so many jokes and memes. I'm like, what actually happened? It takes a long time to find the actual information.

They also seem to have just wilder swings than we do in the U.S., right? Like, they'll see a politician with a 7% approval rating. No, there is important information there, right? The fact that Labor was ahead by, like, 35 points before she resigned, you would never see that in the U.S. context, right? There's no chance, given contemporary political coalitions, that, you know, Joe Biden could cure cancer and...

defeat Vladimir Putin and I don't know what else happens, right? And it would be like 50/50. 51% approval. Okay, so shall we get to business? Yes. Let's begin with the Senate.

Over the summer, after the Dobbs decision, we saw slow, steady improvement in Democrats' odds of keeping the Senate over months. You know, like two and a half months it took for Democrats to get to their position of having a 70% chance of holding the Senate. Then it hovered there for a while. And then, in the past week or so, we've seen Republicans' odds improve abruptly. The odds of each party winning the Senate now sit at about 50-50.

Usually you would see something like this when there's a big news story, but unless I missed it, I don't know that we have. What's going on? I don't know. I mean, it can be... And that's the show. Thanks, everyone, for coming. I mean, first of all, polling is not presenting, like, an exact replica of...

I don't mean in the sense of our polls accurate or not, but there is some luck and some variance in when certain polls come in at certain times. I think if you had some true infinite number of polls in every day, that might have been more of a smooth curve downward. There are some other theories. It's kind of interesting this little kink in the graph happens right at the 21-day window where polls

in 538 count for future pollster ratings. I don't actually think pollsters are literally concerned about that. - Yeah, that's a little conspiratorial in my book. - Okay, but look, pollsters have incentives to be accurate, right? And we're kind of in the phase now where if you have a poll that's way off, that could generate negative reputational risk, right? So it's not crazy to me to think that pollsters would be

kind of publish the number they really think more than kind of, oh, just trust the data numbers? I don't think it's crazy. Well, if you extend that argument to its logical conclusion, you would say that there's a better chance that the polls are currently off in the direction of favoring Republicans more than they should.

It's not crazy to think that. I mean, our model, more than you might assume, kind of still assumes polls will favor Democrats, in part because we're still seeing a fair number of polls among registered voters. It's pretty clear that Republicans do better in likely voter polls, and the model adjusts for that. In some states where you have out-of-date polling, the model adjusts for the fact that we haven't had

polls yet in the new regime, so it's making a timeline adjustment, as it's called. In some states, the fundamentals don't look particularly strong for Democrats, so they've kind of overcome the fundamentals all cycle, maybe not anymore. So if you had to bet relative to, like, the 538 polling average, you'd still bet on the actual reality being more Republican than the polls. But it's not a crazy argument, right? I mean, people should always consider that possibility that, like,

Maybe it is an unusual cycle. One thing in the back of my head is when you have had actual elections since Dobbs, Democrats did very, very well. Not only did it not look like a red wave, it looked like kind of a borderline blue wave year. I think pollsters have very little incentive to... If the polls miss and Democrats do really well...

Within a certain boundary, if they do crazy well and Ron DeSantis loses, okay. If they have a night on the high end of expectations, they pick up two Senate seats and maybe the House is a photo finish and goes to some recounts... No one's going to cancel us if that happens, but if the reverse happens, we're screwed. Yeah, pretty much. But given those incentives, people respond to those incentives potentially.

Do you think at this point the forecast is getting ahead of the polls in a way? Our congressional model is not particularly aggressive, right? In part because you have these fluctuations that kind of tend to even out over time. Because it's like, oh, man, this is so slow to adjust to Dobbs. You see it's like Dobbs happened...

middle June, and it takes until September 22nd for the forecast to peak, right? Because it's skeptical, skeptical, skeptical. But then maybe it actually adjusted too much, if you think about it that way. So it's actually kind of like a tricky question to define what you're trying to optimize for. But no, it's not as aggressive as our presidential models where it can shift by a few points in a day. One other thing, too, that's a more technical point is that

Whenever you're near 50/50 in something, you're near the fat part of the distribution, a shift will affect the numbers more. It doesn't take that much to go from 70 to 60. It takes a lot to go from 85 to 95 because you're out on the tail. So we're in the middle part here and to go to 60/40 one way, 60/40 the other way isn't that big a shift in some sense.

There are two weeks left. If this were a presidential election, we would say, sure, this forecast could change again by, you know, 15 percentage points between now and election day. Do you think that's still possible in a midterm environment? I mean, I think we'll be somewhere in the 60-40 bucket. I think I'd give...

two to one odds that we'll be somewhere in that 60/40 range? Odds of where the odds... We're getting too far out. We've got to change the topic. I mean, look for a while, like... So the past few days of polls have seen a little bit more stability. You know, you've seen some of the CNN polls are pretty good for Democrats, for example. So less of the sky is falling, but I mean, look, we're gonna...

go into election night with some degree of, well, considerable degree of uncertainty in the Senate. In the House, we're probably at the point now where there has to be like a systematic polling error favoring Democrats for them to win. Although again, like, the polls and the model are slightly different things, right? The model assumes that there's going to be a fairly big turnout differential. If that doesn't happen, then the House gets more competitive, right? I mean, if you take the raw generic ballot, unadjusted for likely voters,

If you actually have that being the popular vote, that would be potentially pretty competitive in the House. And the forecast right now thinks it's actually going to turn out to be a three-point Republican advantage to a four-point Republican advantage. Three and a half, yeah. One reason for that is that there are more empty districts where Democrats don't have a candidate that accounts for like a point or a point and a half of it. But also there's a likely voter adjustment that affects that.

Speaking of the generic ballot, let's move on to the House. So Republicans have an 81% chance of winning the chamber. I think for a lot of people, an 81% chance sounds like a done deal. We started putting that uncertainty in context just now. You know, put these odds in context, Mr. Silver. What does an 81% chance even mean? It's pocket aces against pocket fives. Democrats have pocket fives. Sometimes you hit a set on the flop.

Okay. You're not happy about it. What's one House district that you have your eyes on in terms of sort of judging the outcome of the midterms or reading the tea leaves of where the political coalitions go from here?

I think the Ohio 9 race, he's the one who allegedly badly overstated his military credentials, and it's a Trump-ish district in Toledo. She is still ahead in our model, but there's been very little polling. That's kind of the classic match-up of you have a problematic Republican candidate and a fairly strong incumbent, but how much can you survive?

in a red-ish district in a red-ish year. So that's probably a pretty good benchmark. How much has the importance of incumbency declined over the past decade or so? Because we still see prime examples of incumbency mattering, particularly maybe in Senate races that we saw in 2020 and 2018, right? Joe Manchin. Susan Collins. Susan Collins, famously.

So how do we go about judging when incumbency matters and when it doesn't? It's declined quite a bit, and it's kind of hidden in certain ways. It's hidden in part because there are so few competitive districts that you can be a mediocre incumbent and win because your state's really red or really blue. But no, the incumbency advantage at this point is probably only a couple of percentage points on average. If you're an incumbent who breaks from...

Their party, if you're an incumbent who is actually in smaller states, so states like West Virginia or Montana or Alaska, incumbency can be quite a bit more powerful. You have more relationship with your constituents. So in some circumstances it matters more, but the generic one-term senator in Ohio or Florida or Pennsylvania probably doesn't have much of an incumbency advantage anymore.

During the summer, as we saw Democrats improve their lot in the polls and in the forecast, we actually had a way to test those numbers, which you brought up before, through special elections. We had a good number of special elections throughout the summer. Before the Dobbs decision, Republicans had a two-point overperformance in those special elections. After the Dobbs decision, Democrats overperformed.

had a nine-point overperformance in those special elections. Now, the sample is small, but we were able to look and say, "This isn't just differential response bias. This is people actually getting motivated or demotivated or persuaded and turning up to the polls." We, you know, unfortunately for us, we want all the data we can get, haven't had any special elections

after this polling shift in Republicans' direction. Is there any other way to test this in the absence of a special election? I know there's a test coming in two weeks, but, you know, if we... Let's just wait for that. No, there aren't. I mean, there aren't, right? I mean, there's like... Don't look at early vote data. Just don't do it. Don't do it.

No, in two weeks there will be a test. It would have been nice to have some random special election in Pennsylvania this week. That would be fun. But no, it's almost like you enter the fog of ignorance now. Obviously our forecast can shift and will shift to some degree between now and November 8th.

It's almost like you could go to sleep for two weeks, go to the Grand Canyon, one of those trips where you go to the Grand Canyon and 9/11 happens or something. Wow, that's dark. Are you mining your own personal life? No, I feel like there are 37 stories in Esquire magazine historically about someone goes to the Grand Canyon on a two-week camping trip and then the world changes. Isn't that like a genre? Yeah, I don't know about that, but I get what you're talking about. Yeah. But now would be a relatively good time to do that.

So, wait, are you then, Mr. Silver yourself, one of the people who would say, like, don't look at the polls, don't look at the forecast, you're going to find out soon enough? Our boss is sitting right there, and we love traffic, so this might have to be off the record. But what are you saying? I mean, what more are we going to learn? I mean, I guess there is some question about, like, kind of, has this Republican surge abated or is it continuing, right? But I'm not sure we're going to, like, we're going to go into election night, I think, with, like,

the Senate being highly uncertain, and with a clear Republican but not impossible Democratic path in the House. So despite your suggestion that people sit in the uncertainty for two weeks, that's not what people are going to do. That's not even what we're going to do. And so in the run-up to a close election like this, people try to look for other sources of data to try to read things.

the tea leaves, and that brings us to today's good or bad use of polling.

One of these pieces of data is oftentimes enthusiasm, and NBC recently published a poll on enthusiasm with the following write-up. Quote, the poll found 70% of all registered voters expressing high interest in the election, either a 9 or a 10 on a 10-point scale, the highest percentage ever in the survey for a midterm election at this point. This comes after, of course, record turnout in 2018.

By party, 78% of Republicans have high interest in the midterms, compared with 69% of Democrats. The nine-point GOP enthusiasm edge is up from September, when it was plus three, and August, when it was plus two.

How useful is enthusiasm polling like this? That actually is a pretty good indication historically. There are different ways to frame that question. Sometimes people ask how this is compared to your usual interest in midterms, but like that question's been reasonably predictive of

Both overall turnout and turnout differential. And so, you know, the theme here is you're not going to have a year like 2010 or 2014 where democratic turnout was pathetic, right? You're going to have at least pretty good democratic turnout unless pollsters are totally full of shit, right? But you're going to have also really good Republican turnout, if not better, and Democrats might have the deal closing, the deal with swing voters on Tuesday.

Wait, Ed, so can we talk about why this is? Because I think after the Dobbs decision, the word on the street was that enthusiasm was really high amongst Democratic voters, even independents who were motivated by the issue. Republicans had become somewhat demotivated. Now that we're sort of in the fall, is it just that, you know, the historic trends are setting in when your party is out of power and you don't really like the party in power? Like, dissatisfaction is more motivating in politics, electoral politics, than dissatisfaction

than satisfaction? I mean, in general, yes. In general, there is a enthusiasm advantage that helps the out party, the opposition party, this year the Republicans. There's also historically been, just in general, like a Republican turnout advantage because their voters tend to be

Older, whiter, used to be more educated, they faced fewer barriers to voting, right, and have historically higher turnout. Now some of that is shifting. Now that you have Democrats have this college-educated coalition, those people tune into midterm news more and are more likely to vote. So I'm not sure whether there's the historical GOP bias in the voter polls, but there is the conditional advantage that when you're out of power,

Although, again, I should be careful because, like, you know, how out of power is the GOP when you have a lot of major states where you have very aggressive GOP governors and when you have a Supreme Court that is pretty activist, right? So that was kind of the argument. That's, like, the historical argument. If Democrats have a... If they hold the House, then...

The best argument for why they did that is because the GOP was demonstrating to voters how much power it had, even in this off-year election. Well, this brings up a good point, because in some ways, if you look at the individual states, obviously in each state a different party is oftentimes in power. There are some states where there's divided power, but you get the point.

Do we see differential turnout amongst partisans based on the actual partisanship of a state? Like, Democrats in a red state might be more motivated to turn out because they're upset about Dobbs or something like that, or Republicans in a blue state are more motivated to turn out because they're upset about the shutdowns and inflation and whatever it may be.

I'd have to think about how I'd test that question empirically. It's not a crazy thought, right, that you are reactive in part against... Every now and then it seems like you get... What was it? The Scott Brown-Cokely election back in 2010, right? Where if you're in a state where your vote usually doesn't matter, and then for some reason you randomly get an election where it can matter, I think that can be motivating. I mean, probably there are states where you move, and if you're a Republican in New York City, then you kind of just...

disengage from politics because your vote doesn't really control very much. So, you know, maybe it's something around the margin, but I haven't looked at that rigorously. Well, speaking of frustrating partisan conceptions, impulses, let's talk about governors. And yes, do you guys recognize who that is? 5E is here with us tonight. Of course, yeah.

So, governors' races tend to be less partisan than House or Senate races. That's how you end up with popular Republican governors of Massachusetts, popular Democratic governors of Louisiana. Recently, we've seen polls showing closer-than-expected races in states like Oklahoma and New York. In Oklahoma, incumbent governor Kevin Stitt is only leading his Democratic opponent, Joy Hoffmeister, by a point in our polling average.

But our forecast suggests that he has a 91% chance of re-election. What is going on here? Should we pay more attention to the forecast or more attention to the polling average? The forecast. It incorporates more information. I mean... A man with confidence.

First of all, this is where the power of empiricism helps. If you go back and look at all the elections where the polling is kind of close in a state that's either really red or really blue and what happens, it usually kind of defaults to the partisan winner in that state. I should say there are different versions of the forecast. The light version in Oklahoma has it 6.5%.

6535 or something, right? And the fundamentals version has it, you know, 8020 or something. But, like, the expert forecasters are skeptical this is happening. By the way, you have a few recent polls, but they're kind of smaller sample size polls, not necessarily a lot of pollsters in Oklahoma that have a long track record. So it's not like you have, like,

the murderer's row of pollsters polling Oklahoma, for example, right? You have some suggestion the race is competitive, but if you look more often than not, the Democrats are one point behind in Oklahoma, and they wind up having a relatively good year but losing by six or something.

So should we apply the same logic to New York, where we've seen Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul's lead over Republican Lee Zeldin has fallen from 16 points to 7 points since Labor Day? There are polls out now showing low single-digit leads for Kathy Hochul. Again, our forecast suggests that she has a 97% chance of winning re-election. Are there circumstances in which we do see

someone like a Lee Zeldin winning in a midterm environment where partisanship applies less to gubernatorial races, you know, one party has full control of the White House and Congress. I mean, he does not have the profile of someone who you would think would overperform that much, nor does Hochul seem like she has any enormous problems necessarily. Would we have that race probabilistically? I mean, I think pretty low for Zeldin. Yeah, 3% chance.

First of all, she has a pretty big lead in the poll. Whether she's underperforming or not is one thing, but there's also a fair number of spammy polls, partisan-affiliated polls in that race. It kind of feels like a race that people are trying to make happen a little bit like South Carolina and Lindsey Graham a couple years ago or something, but South Carolina is less red than

New York is blue. If she loses, then we're back in, oh my God, polls on another disastrous night, aftermath kind of scenario where it would be a very bad route for Democrats. I don't think she has individual factors that would cause her to lose unless just the polls are totally bad. It should happen. On the topic of governors, check out this segue.

There are some rising stars in both parties running for reelection or election in gubernatorial races this year. Ron DeSantis in Florida, Kerry Lake in Arizona, Beto O'Rourke in Texas, Stacey Abrams in Georgia, Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, which gets me thinking about 2024. You ready? Okay, I'm always ready.

How will the results of 2022 shape who runs and even who wins in 2024? And let's, we're going to do like, you always give me like an A1, A2, B1, B2, when you're trying to like break down your explanations for how things are going. So A1 is how does Biden's decision about whether or not to run again in 2024 get shaped by the midterm outcomes? Or is that irrelevant?

Well, it'll definitely affect the media narrative about Biden. Back when Democrats looked like they were going to get routed in the midterms, you heard, and when Biden had 37% of people ready, you heard...

almost a presumption that he would be out of office after the first term, and then it kind of shifted toward, of course he's the strongest democratic alternative. I mean, I think that probably over-shifted relative to the decision that, like it's probably ultimately about like, you know, what is his physical and mental stamina for

next four years, and/or how does he think that will play with voters, and how much of a liability might that be, and does he think he is the best person to win re-election for Democrats. But certainly if you have, I mean you already had

candidates like Gavin Newsom running for 2024. You'll have much more of that maybe quietly at first and not so quietly after that if Democrats get routed, right? You'll have less of that if they have a good year and in the middle then it's kind of status quo, I guess. But yeah, for sure. I mean, if you go to prediction markets, I think they still have Biden as an underdog to run or to be the nominee, not to run necessarily, but to be the nominee in 2024.

So let's break these rising stars into a couple buckets. We have the folks who have almost no chance, between little chance and almost no chance of winning, Beto O'Rourke and Stacey Abrams. If you run and lose two high-profile statewide campaigns, and then in Beto's case also a national campaign, and lose all of them, is your career over?

I think they're in different buckets, actually. I mean, I think, like, so first of all, like, in general, parties benefit from having plausible stand-ins in case something goes wrong, right? If Greg Abbott has some major scandal that can still cost candidates five or ten points, then Beto can win, and so, you know, you'd rather have that than when you have a problematic Democratic candidate as well. I mean, Abrams, I think, is underperforming

a little bit, right? I mean, Kemp... Well, certainly Warnock, but obviously those are two very different races. They're different races, but she seems to be running kind of more of a nationalized race where she's running to the left, if anything, a little bit, and, you know, I'm not sure if she's not trying to position herself more for, like, just being a player on the national scene and a part of the conversation, right? But no, I do feel like candidates get, like,

If you're a political party, to have credible candidates who take that 5% or 10% flyer that comes through sometimes,

You want to encourage that, and so they're probably both going to lose and they'll get a lot of crap at them, but it's a healthy thing for a party when they are running a race anywhere they have even a remote chance. Well, you hear that argument on two counts. One is what you were saying on the off-chance, if Kemp doesn't win the primary and all of a sudden Stacey Abrams is running against David Perdue, then the race might look different. But you also hear the argument like, oh, parties should put up...

strong, viable candidates, even in states where they know they might lose because it's a process of building a party infrastructure and, like, one day we will win. Is that how politics works? I don't know. I mean, party, you know, you never know. Like, Alaska is a state now where Democrats have a House incumbent. I mean, it's probably because of the ranked choice voting system, right? But, like, but you never know when a state, like,

Alaska is going to become more competitive. It's not crazy to think that Alaska is so eccentric that in eight years or 12 years, Alaska is some type of swing state. No, I think it's always good to play for the long term, and Democrats have kind of forgotten that. You had the whole kind of 50-straight strategy under Howard Dean, and now, like I mentioned earlier, you have far more

There's no Democrat running, then no Republican running. And there could also be things where, you know, if you have down ballot races going down to dog catcher and city council, you know, people don't even see Democrat on the ballot, there's no straight ticket option, then that can potentially hurt the party too. The flip side of this is like people, I think, spend too much time donating.

to hopeless races with meme-ified candidates, right? So that's one risk, right, is that people aren't spending their money in cases where it would matter more. Okay, so next bucket, rising star Republicans, Ron DeSantis and Kerry Wake.

Ron DeSantis has an over 90% chance of winning re-election. According to our forecast, Kerry Lake is in a pretty competitive race. It's more or less a 50-50 proposition, the gubernatorial race in Arizona. Do folks like that have a real argument to make against Trump as the heir apparent to the nomination in 2024? I mean, I think... Well, DeSantis is clearly...

like Newsom, but even more so, kind of already running a 2024 campaign, right? He's not officially declared yet, neither is Trump for that matter, but he is doing the things to gain a national profile. You can see him kind of carving out kind of wings against the center, where on the one hand...

The true Fox News watching conservatives might actually think that he is more on the ball talking about the controversy of the day and busting immigrants to Martha's Vineyard and critical race theory, right? Whereas the moderates might think at the end of the day he's a little bit more sane than Trump and we can trust him a little bit more. So he's already kind of running a somewhat tactically effective campaign. I think it somewhat remains to be seen how charismatic and appealing he actually is as a candidate.

Blake is someone who you can kind of predict, given the psyche of the media, would attract a lot of attention.

attention, right, as here's someone who is Trump, but in a much more presentable package. This is someone who says staunchly that the 2020 election was rigged, basically made that the center of her primary campaign, and has stuck to it in a way that even other Republican candidates have not in competitive statewide elections. In a swing state, too, and she's now...

outperforming Blake Masters a little bit. So what's up with that? She's an extreme candidate. The things that she says about 2020 are verifiably false. And yet she is doing significantly better than Blake Masters in that race. Because she has this TV newscaster persona where you can kind of... I don't think she would come across to the average voter as extreme. And she walks a line that...

With Trump it's so explicit, and DeSantis it's so nakedly tactical in a Ted Cruzian way. But with Lake it's like, oh, you can speak with some ambiguity to have practices like on-air talent where... You watch the interview, ABC News with John Karl, right? He just walks the line where if you don't know the subtext and the context, and she says, well, if...

the election is fair, then of course I'll respect it, right? Like, that won't seem that crazy to the average voter necessarily, right? It's more the subtext of what she really believes over time that makes her much further, at least on Stop the Steal stuff, right wing than someone else might seem.

Final bucket here is, I mentioned Gretchen Whitmer because we're talking about gubernatorial candidates. You could maybe add Raphael Warnock to the pack, even though he's running for re-election in a Senate campaign. Is it clear who, other than Gavin Newsom, would make a sort of like plausible pitch to be the next Democratic nominee in a way that would maybe encourage Joe Biden to be like, eh?

Maybe not. As a Michigander, I think Whitmer is a fairly heavy favourite and might overperform in the environment. I think she's also going to be, if she is re-elected, in her second term. By the way, that's true. Wisconsin is a toss-up right now. But in our forecast, Whitmer is doing very... Our forecast thinks she's winning.

She's been solidly ahead in the polls. Some have a smaller margin, some have a wider margin. She has a pretty good argument. Two-term governor from a swing state overperformed the fundamentals. If you're in your second term, you don't have this thing about it's a little weird if Beto somehow won. You'd be like, I finally won an election. Now I'm going to run for president. That would be pretty weird. So I'm not sure these first-term governors are really going to be plausible candidates.

I mean, Warnock is interesting. If somehow Stacey Abrams won in Georgia, or you'd have a Democrat reappointed to the Senate, right, then I guess from a special election, I guess that seat would come up yet again if he somehow ran, right? I mean, maybe if Democrats, like, maybe if Warnock wins and Democrats lose the Senate anyway, then maybe 51-49 versus 52-48 doesn't matter, but the fact that he would

cost Democrats, assuming Kemp wins, at least temporarily, a Senate seat is kind of a liability. So from the perspective of you have to resign to run, the party wouldn't really stand for it. You don't have to resign, unless there's laws in Georgia that would compel that. You don't have to resign. Or that if you win, you have to resign. Yeah. Why not be like, oh, I'm going to multitask. LAUGHTER

All right, we have made it through our forecast. I hope that answered every question you've ever had about American politics in the House, Senate, and Governor's Mansions across the country. So now it is time for our special guests. I want to welcome up on stage 538's Washington, D.C. Bureau, Amelia Thompson DeVoe and Nathaniel Rakich. Get on up here. Thank you.

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There's a clock right here. It's 7:45. This was supposed to happen at 7:45, and it's 7:45. This has never happened before. Truly. Yes! Yes! Thank you! Round of applause. Amelia Thompson-DeBeau is a senior writer at FiveThirtyEight. Give her a round of applause. Nathaniel Rakich is a senior elections analyst at FiveThirtyEight. Another round of applause.

I don't know if I'm allowed to do this. Take off your shirt, Galen. Our boss is sitting right there. I asked her before, can I strip during the live show? She was like, yeah, go for it. So here, we're twins. I have a 5E shirt on, too. Here he is.

Radical vulnerability. You both live in DC and we're so happy you could join us tonight. We're gonna play some midterms trivia, but before we get to that, I wanna ask you a little bit about your beats. So, Amelia, you've been covering the Dobbs decision and its political and legal ramifications since before the decision even came down. And in the wake of the decision, as we've discussed, we saw record numbers of Americans saying that abortion was a top issue for the country.

That's fallen some since. And at this point, I'm curious, how is the Dobbs decision shaping these midterms?

So I think there are a couple ways to look at it. One, from my perspective as someone who's been covering abortion for almost a decade, is that what happened over the summer was crazy. I am used to looking in these issue polls and kind of looking down, down, down, down, down the issues, and abortion is right at the bottom. It was just not something that was on people's radar. It was not something they really wanted to think about.

And then the Dobbs decision happened, and it was shocking, and a lot of people were angry, and other people were happy, but it was something that brought this issue forward in a really visceral way, and we saw that in the polls, and abortion wasn't rising as high as the economy and inflation, but it was up there with issues that I'm much more used to seeing at the top of voters' priorities. So in that sense,

even if abortion has fallen a little bit. And I would caveat that by saying, I don't know if we know that it's because abortion has fallen

in voters' priorities or because something like economy and inflation is rising. We don't know that, we just know how they're prioritizing in a list or a group of three. But even if abortion is sort of less salient than it was a few months ago, it has already shaped this midterms. It has brought Democrats into the mix, or certainly helped bring Democrats into the mix in a way that we would not have predicted. So that's my argument for

Dobbs still matters.

Does it matter even more in specific states? Because, of course, we're going to see states where there are ballot questions on legal abortion. We're going to see gubernatorial races where the individual candidates have set themselves up as a proxy for voting on legal abortion or what have you. Are there particular states where you think you're going to be able to look at that election and say, wow, okay, that definitely mattered in Michigan or Arizona, but it probably wasn't really motivating voters in New York?

That's a super interesting question because Democrats are trying to run on abortion everywhere. You've got the Oregon gubernatorial race. Ads are all about abortion. I have to say, Oregon is probably, I don't know if it's the place in the country where abortion rights are the safest, but it is really up there. So if you're thinking about issues that would matter to Oregon voters as they're thinking about their own life and perhaps their own ability to access abortion,

you would not expect that to really motivate people. On the other hand, a state like Michigan, where voters will literally be going out and voting on whether abortion is enshrined in their state constitution, it matters a lot in obvious ways there. And so I think one of the interesting questions will be,

are voters motivated in states where the outcome of the midterms will really matter for abortion access versus how much is this an issue that has percolated into the national environment to the point where even if you're in a blue state where abortion access is not under threat at all, a candidate talking about abortion and talking about the threat to abortion is still going to make you want to come out and vote.

Well, it speaks to the nationalization of our politics, right? People aren't necessarily looking at, you know, whether abortion is at stake in their race. They just think abortion is important nationally, and that's going to motivate me to vote. Right. But it's interesting with abortion, because I spend a lot of time talking to people about abortion, and people in Texas...

I'll just say anecdotally, this is not something that I pulled out of a survey, but people in Texas seem to feel this issue a lot more strongly and sort of experientially than people in blue states. For people in blue states who I talk to who care about abortion, they're saying, "Oh, I'm donating to an abortion fund. I'm doing X, Y, Z." But it's not the same kind of, like, "I see this in my community.

I see this in my state. And I don't know if Dobbs changed that. I think the midterms is going to be a really interesting test. Yeah, once we get the results, we're going to come back here and do this all over again and answer all these questions with the real hard data to get to the bottom of it all. No, we will. Come back. We'll do another live show. Nathaniel, speaking of the election. When we get the results, yeah. When we get the results.

I know this is a synagogue. I'm just going to... This is the scary part of the podcast. Okay, so we all were there when Election Day turned into Election Week in 2020. I don't remember it, but if you say so.

The thing I most remember is that I preempted my birthday party because I was stuck in my apartment for six days covering. Before the election this year, Galen. I know. But it's hard to go hard when you know that there's an election in three days. Right?

You know, I'm going to have my party afterwards so we can really get toe up. So election week. There were questions about the voting process during a pandemic. It took days to get the results in key states. Once those results were in, the president and other Republicans cast doubt on their legitimacy. Should we expect 2022 to be different?

Well, when you told me that we were going to be talking about this, I did some research. Real peek behind the curtain there. Exactly. This is all staged, folks. Originally, I was fairly optimistic that we would get all or most of the results on election night. After doing the research, I am not as sanguine about that, unfortunately.

Yeah, I mean, you know, it just comes down to, like, especially, like, given our forecast numbers in the House right now, right, control of the House, if things go as expected, will probably be known on election night. Republicans will flip that, you know, with some room to spare. The Senate, you know, we now know, basically, it's going to come down to three states, right, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada. Okay.

sorry, not Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Nevada. And I think that there are real questions as to how quickly we'll get the results in all of those states, at least two of them, plus Arizona, which is why I mentioned it, which is, of course, probably number four on the kind of priority list for the Senate. So in Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania is a state that

does not allow pre-processing of absentee ballots, which is why it took, I think, five days in 2020 for the result to be called. And that, of course, was the state that delivered the presidency to Biden. And

And because of that, it's going to take a long time to count absentee votes. And these counties, the people who are counting the votes, they have more experience this year. A lot of counties that actually literally were like, okay, it's 10 p.m., we're going to go home and start counting again in the morning. They've said they won't be doing that this year, so that should be faster. But nothing has kind of fundamentally changed.

in terms of the law. The big thing here is like the question is how many people are gonna vote by mail, of course. During 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, a lot of people voted by mail, obviously around 50% of Pennsylvania votes were mail ballots. Will it be that high this year? Probably not. Will it be higher than usual still? Probably, I think there are a lot of people, in particular Democrats who voted by mail in 2020 were like, hey, this was really convenient, I'm gonna do this going forward.

And so, yeah, so I think in a state like Pennsylvania, especially given, and the X factor here too is how close these races are, right? Even if every ballot were election day and kind of cast in the traditional manner, if a race is super close, you know, within a recount margin, half a percentage point or something like that, it's going to take days, if not longer, to get the winner there. And in a state like Pennsylvania, that could happen. In a state like Georgia, that could happen.

Nevada is a state where they're actually not allowed to report any results until the last voter in line has voted. So we probably won't get any results in Nevada until, I don't know, 11 midnight Eastern time. And then Nevada is a mail, it is now, it is permanently switched to a vote by mail system.

So that could also take days to count. I wouldn't be surprised if we're waiting on Nevada to decide control of the Senate. Oh, and then in Georgia, we have the Georgia runoffs, which there's a good chance. So it could be December, right? Right. There's a good chance. You're telling us to cancel our Thanksgiving plans, too. Exactly.

Probably everybody in the audience already knows this because you're at a 538 Politics podcast taping, but if no candidate in Georgia gets at least 50% of the vote, that goes to a runoff in December. So yeah, control of the Senate, I don't think we'll know on election night. So when it comes to first round, we put runoffs to the side for a second. You had to pick a date on which we will know the results of the 2022 midterms. Which date?

And then you're going to have to do the over-under. Yeah, you're going to hold it to me. I mean, look, a lot does depend on whether the polls and the forecast are accurate, right? If kind of things go down as we expect and Nevada in particular is super, super close, I'm going to say maybe Thursday in terms of just kind of being able to identify a candidate with a clear lead there. But again, if it comes down to Georgia, the runoff, yeah. You're taking the over-under? Yeah.

When will ABC News call the election or when will I know? Which, like, to pull the curtain back for a second, I don't even think we've ever talked about this before. I went to bed on election night 2020 knowing who had won.

Well, that's... I did. On Tuesday? Yeah. I mean, I went to bed at like 4 o'clock in the morning, but it was clear who had won to me by the time I went to bed. After that Milwaukee thing, like the police asked word of the ballots in Milwaukee. Arizona had been called, and by the time I went to bed at 4, Wisconsin was called. Can we be honest? Arizona shouldn't have been called. That was very premature by Fox. It was. Okay, fair enough. So maybe you're calling me ignorant for believing that call. I went to bed assuming, you know,

If Arizona has been called, right, then Republicans have very few outs, right? They would have to kind of sweep the remaining races. But Arizona was obviously very competitive. But we also, beyond just the Fox call, we had reason to believe, based on how the vote was being counted, where the vote was, et cetera, to believe that it would end up in Democrats' column. So I take your criticism of Fox's call. I still went to bed on election night knowing who won. Back to 2022. Over, under, Thursday.

For when will I know? I'll take the under. I'll take Wednesday. You're going to know on Wednesday? It's a weird... I think there's like a 60% chance that you have a clear enough outcome that we'll know on some wee hour of the morning on election night, right? And then it kind of becomes elongated to where... Although the Georgia runoff does throw that into some doubt. So maybe like 50-50, we know election night. I don't know if there's a call, right?

you know, all the time we don't know election night, half the time we know the next day whether or not it's called, maybe you have the function that looks like that. You truly love to just like tear those odds out. Tear them out. You want to cover every single base. Like the Empire State Building, right? It's narrower and narrower. Yeah. We love an art deco explanation by Nate Silver. Amelia, over under.

I am going to say over to be interesting and also because this election has been way more interesting than it should have been. Yeah, that uninteresting. Why should it stop being interesting and why should our November be calm? Yeah. And I'll add that... It's all about us, right? The whole politics world is just designed to make our lives... You should rank the elections. Based on what? How much I hated my life. Yeah.

I have some really weird, you know, whatever. Anyway, I got some really weird stories I can share with them. We all have a lot of good stories from 2020 election week. You know what you guys know what's next? Trivia. Political trivia. Who's ready? Okay, so the way this works is whoever gets closest to the correct answer will get a point. There's no negotiating correct answers. I know the people that I'm playing with. I know you are ones to try to

Squeeze out that extra point, debate your way into a win. That will not happen. Our lovely intern Emily Vanesky tracked down a lot of this data. She's right there. Give her a round of applause, honestly. She's also part of our DC bureau. But if you have any issues with the answers, you don't think they're actually correct, you can take them up with Emily on your own time. We're not entertaining those tonight. I mean, you know, you're so much more fun to yell at than Emily.

Okay. So the first question begins with a little bit of a story. So when I was getting ready for this live show tonight, I pulled up the slideshow from our last live show, which was at 6th and I on January 16th, 2020. And the first slide was the 538.9

Democratic primary forecast 2020 showing the odds that, you know, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, et cetera, would win the Democratic nomination. And I just thought, wow, it's been a long couple years. So the first question to all of you is,

is on January 16th, 2020, what was Joe Biden's chance of winning the Democratic nomination? We're going to change up the flow from one question to the next because I know there are advantages to going last. So, Nathaniel, we're going to start with you. I did study for this, but I didn't study this. Gosh, I really did memory hole 2020. I'll say 45%. Nate?

Well, is this the version where we have no winner? Where we have contested convention as a scenario? Because our model liked that one for a while. I'm going to go 38%. Okay. Amelia? This is challenging because I have to remember how many people were running at that point. I will say 40%. And Amelia gets it. It is 40%. There you go.

For the folks listening along at home, there's then Sanders with a 23% chance, no one with a 15% chance, Warren with a 13% chance, Buttigieg with an 8% chance, and all others at a 1% chance. One point, Amelia. Next question. What percentage of the voting age population voted in the 2018 midterms, which was a record-setting turnout year?

Let's start with you. The voting age population or the voter eligible population? Voting age population. 49. 49, okay. Amelia? I think it was 47. No, Nathaniel? Sorry, Nate, 50. 50. That's 53%. Whoa! Which means, Nathaniel Rakich, you got it.

In 2014, this is data from the census, the Census Bureau recorded the lowest turnout rate on record, which was only 42% of the voting age population turned out. So you know, like, I don't know what you all think, but like, we cover polls and surveys of Americans on all kinds of things, and we're like, oh, this is what Americans think, this is what Americans think, and especially when you're focusing on polls of all things elections, especially in a term like this, you're

You're not actually talking about, you're only talking about like half the country. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah. - A lot of people don't care. - All right, Amelia, you ready to-- - I was born ready. - This is a fun one. - Oh good. - Jimmy Carter holds the record for the most movies watched in the White House Family Theater. How many movies did he watch during his one term as president?

That's an extremely impressive record because he only served one term. Maybe that's why he didn't get re-elected. He was just watching movies. I mean, was he watching a movie every night? I'll say 250. 250. Nathaniel? I think it's way higher than that. No, did you say this from like what experience did you say this from? Okay. I'm going to say 600. Oh.

Okay, 250, 600. I don't think I could name 600 movies. 249. I'll take the under. He's the f*cking president. He's busy. Okay, I want to gauge what the audience thinks the answer is. So, you're going to vote by applause. So who thinks it was 250? Who thinks it was 600? Who thinks it was 249?

It was 480 movies. Nathaniel gets it. That's a little horrifying. We're not paying them to watch movies. Did they even have that many movies back then? Yeah, I know, right? This data comes courtesy of Paul Fisher, the White House projectionist from 1953 to 1986. Jimmy Carter was also the first president to watch an X-rated movie in the White House theater.

Watching Midnight Cowboy with his family. Okay, so it is Nate Silver, zero. Amelia, one. Rakich, two. Are we back to where we began? Yes. Nebraska, Nevada, and Washington, D.C. voters are deciding if they will increase the minimum wage this election cycle. In the past 20 years, there have been 21 ballot measures to increase the minimum wage across the country. What percentage have passed?

Good question. This is a very rakish question. You love a good ballot measure. Wait, are you literally putting the answer in front of me? Get out of here! 90.48%, which is 19 out of 21. You gotta round it to the nearest tenth. 90.5%. 19 out of 21. 90.5? Yeah. Okay. I'm trying to figure out the final Jeopardy strategy here.

97. 97. All right, bold. Which is 90. Amelia? No, I'm going to say 80. Mr. Silver, you get it. It is 100%. Wow. The next question, I think the DCers might have a little bit of an advantage here. The District of Columbia is not a state. I thank you, Emily, for emphasizing that in the question writing. She wants you to feel it.

But when compared to all 50 states, where does Washington DC rank in the gallons of wine consumed per capita? Is it me? You're up first this time. First? First. So am I allowed to say first? No, you can't. No. No. You can't call dudes on an answer. You can't call someone else's answer. That's never in the rules. Okay, these aren't percentages. They're allowed to say. Is she allowed to say first? Emily, you get to pick. Is she allowed to say first?

I don't want to say first anymore. I don't want it. I never want it. Emily says no. Emily says no. Okay. All right, fine. I will say third then. Second. And Nathaniel gets it. It's second. What's first? Can we guess who's first?

So what's number one? Can we guess who's first? Oh, yes. Okay. For a bonus point. So wait, wait, wait. I just, sometimes I have difficulty with math when I don't have a calculator in front of me. So it's one to three to one, right? One, Amelia. Three, Nathaniel. One, Nate. Yes. It's a bonus point if you can guess number one. So who goes first? Same as last time. Nate, go ahead. Oregon. Okay. I gotta say California. Okay. Wine state. Vermont. What? What?

Wait. Okay, DC, we have an actual sample to poll right here. So if you're second, who do you think is number one? Wisconsin? Have you been to Wisconsin? They drink like fish. Yeah, but they drink beer. They drink beer and they drink liquor. Go to a bar in Wisconsin and try to order a glass of wine. Okay, let's try one more time. Yell out to more states. Connecticut's a good one. Connecticut is kind of a good one. Connecticut is really good, yeah.

I honestly didn't hear a single person say it. Guys, it's Idaho. Wait, what? All right. Okay, so, so, so, so, so, so. We all know that data is not always... This is creating pandemonium in the house. Okay, so we all know that data is not always so simple, and there are different ways to measure this, and we were measuring it by gallon...

of ethanol alcohol per wine consumed by state per capita. Oh, well, if you had told me that. Which, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, is the best way to measure it. Wow. Well, they would know. Someone really liked that. According to the Beer Institute, heard of it?

I haven't. According to the Beer Institute, Washingtonians drink more wine than any state, but they measure it by the glass and based on estimates. So consolation prize for all of you. There you go. Yeah. Okay. So it is Nate 1, Amelia 1, Nathaniel 3.

Of presidents since World War II, President Obama lost the most combined House and Senate seats during his presidency, counting all three elections after he was first elected, and that's the two midterms and his re-election campaign. How many combined House and Senate seats did Democrats lose during his presidency? Gosh, I don't know. This is a bad one for me to be going first. 140? 140. Nathaniel? 80. 80. 80.

81. Mr. Silver gets it. It's 85 seats. That is only two more than Dwight Eisenhower lost during his presidency. I was going to say 85, but I'm just playing my positional advantage here. No need to, yeah. There you go. Strategy first. Yeah. Okay, so it's 3-2-1. Ooh, all right. I've got to step up my game. This is the final question that we're going to take. Audience questions. Are you ready?

According to census data from 2019, DC has the highest percentage of same-sex couple households in the country when compared to the 50 states. What percentage of DC households are same-sex couples? I hear cheering in the audience. For statistics, right? Of the audience, essentially. Nathaniel? A lot of whispering in the audience.

So I should say, we tried to track down the gayest congressional district in America a couple years ago for something I was working on. And it just so happened to be that I lived in it. It doesn't exist anymore, but it was New York's 10th. And it's complicated because the American Community Survey doesn't ask straight up, like,

"Are you gay?" and like, "Are you living with your partner?" And so the estimates run low. I'll give you that hint. Like, I think DC is gayer than this number actually sounds. Interesting. So like, roommates would or would not count? So it's just like, it's looking at whether there are two men. Well, the roommates are in a household. And they're married. Oh, they have to be. I think. Oh, they're married? Oh, it's a romantic couple. Okay.

I'm gonna get boxed out by you guys either way, so I'll just say 10%. - Okay, expert. - Four. - Four. - Okay. - Seven. I'm gonna lose anyway, seven. - Don't be so hard on yourself, it's 7.1%, there you go! That is the highest compared to any state in the nation, with the national average being 1.5%, so congratulations, DC, on being so gay!

Now, we are going to end with some questions from the audience. But before we do that... Who won, Galen? Oh, sorry. I guess, Nathaniel, you won. Round of applause for Nathaniel. All right. That's a wrap for today's podcast. Thank you, Nate, Amelia, and Nathaniel.

And thank you to Sixth and I for hosting us tonight. A special thanks to Vanessa Diaz, our colleague who took the lead on organizing tonight's show. Thank you, Vanessa. We love you. Thanks again to our intern, Emily. Emily Vanesky, of course, played a big role tonight. Round of applause for her. And most importantly, thanks to all of you for coming tonight.

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. You can also watch this podcast on YouTube. Thanks again, and we'll see you soon.