Super Tuesday Brings A Couple Surprises
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I just almost swore on ABC News Live. What did you say? I was talking about what happens to Nikki Haley voters, and I referenced the Pumas from 2008. And I said, party unity might... I'm not going to say the rest.

Hello and welcome to this late night Super Tuesday reaction podcast. I'm Galen Druke and it is about half past midnight on the East Coast. We have results projected almost everywhere except Europe.

and Alaska as far as the Republican presidential side is concerned. And it was not a clean sweep. Trump did not go 15 for 15. Nikki Haley has won Vermont, marking her second win

contest win in the 2024 Republican primary. So I give the award to Nathaniel, I think, for saying we should be more open to a potential Nikki Haley win. Jeffrey, as the member of this podcast who is currently sitting in Vermont and

I guess had faith that Donald Trump would carry 15 out of 15. I guess it's time to eat a little bit of humble pie. How are you feeling, Jeff? Yeah, I think in Vermont, what they would say is it's time to eat some Jeezem Crow. All right. I appreciate it. I appreciate the focus. Just to really link those things together.

That common Vermont expression. But I should say, I'm really burying the lead here, which is that Jason Palmer has won the Democratic primary in American Samoa. You know, let's hold our horses. It was not a primary. It was a caucus that had 91 people, 91 voters.

Hey, American Samoa, you have shocked the nation. Yeah, I mean, forget about Trump going 15 for 15. Who had that Biden wouldn't get everything tonight? It solidifies American Samoa as the most. What's the word I'm looking for? Heterogeneous of the Democratic electorates. Michael Bloomberg, Jason Palmer,

Honestly, we're going to have to pay more attention to American Samoa going forward. Sure, let's take some trips there. I mean, why not? Reporting trip, you know? If we have to, if we have to. If our boss is listening, Lulu, we would like to go to American Samoa to cover the next Democratic caucus in 2028. We are willing to put in the work. We are willing to go as a whole team. We will stay for weeks if we have to. We will do it. We can do hard things.

As you have already heard, I am joined on this podcast by several colleagues, senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich. Welcome. How are you? Hi, Galen. I'm good. I'm in my PJs. I'm ready for this. Also here with us is politics reporter Kaylee Rogers. Welcome to the podcast. How's it going? It's good. Are you really in your PJs, Nathaniel? I am, yeah. You can't tell? So adorable. Is it a onesie? No, no. It's just like a top and then pants.

Kayleigh, last week you complained that our late night podcast wasn't late enough. Are you satisfied with the lateness of this podcast? Yeah, speaking of eating crow. Also here with us is senior elections analyst Jeffrey Skelly. Welcome to the podcast, Jeffrey. How's it going? Hey, Galen. Vermont really shocked the nation, right? That's what Vermont did. Our Vermont correspondent. Why don't we start there then, Jeff? What happened in Vermont? Because I should say, like,

To make this not just jokey and actually a little more meaningful, going into today,

There was some suggestion that if Nikki Haley was going to overperform or even win a state, it was going to be in states that had open or semi-open primaries where the electorate had a higher level of four-year college degree attainment. And the states that sort of ticked some of those boxes also included Virginia, Colorado, maybe Massachusetts, Utah to some extent.

She didn't perform particularly well in any of those states. Utah, we don't have full results yet. But Vermont is the only place where she really performed well. And she didn't just perform well. She won the state. So why Vermont? Well, again, Vermont was a state that we looked at as being perhaps her best or one of her best upset opportunities. And I think it's got to come down to a combination of a Republican primary electorate that is

more moderate than other parts of the country. And I think actually something that I touched on in the live blog tonight, but something that stuck out to me was if you look back at the 2016 Republican primary and sort of the breakdown of who won what and sort of what share of the vote different candidates got, and if you add them together and sort of use them as a rough outline of sort of the Republican Party now and

and the Trump, like very much the Trump era, you can actually see that Vermont is the only state that was voting today where the combined vote of

of John Kasich and Marco Rubio, who had supporters who looked a lot more like Nikki Haley's supporters, actually was slightly larger than the share of the vote won by Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson. It was the only one. And lo and behold, it was 50 to 47, and the result in Vermont is scarily close to 50-47. It's 50 to 46 right now.

In favor of Haley. And I'm not saying that this is like the perfect marker, but it has been a pretty, pretty handy back of the napkin kind of math thing that I've used throughout this primary. And it happened to really work out in Vermont this time around.

Yeah, Jeff, the last time we had a Late Night Reaction podcast, we were talking about Michigan and you used this same math. And I said, have you discovered an election forecasting tool that is more reliable than the polls? And you said, no, I haven't. But I don't know, at this point, we might be looking at a trend. I think you have. I feel like this is sort of like, you know how sometimes we'll get like the outlier poll and it has a million headlines? Yeah.

But then like the polling average is substantially different. So of course, the outlier got a lot of attention. I feel like this is maybe more in that bailiwick. It's also just like just some common sense, like standard, but it's not that doesn't mean that it's actually like a useful forecasting tool. Because if you like look at the county level results, it really does vary quite a bit in terms of how useful that the back of the napkin math I was using actually works.

Okay, fair enough. Let me expand this out. We have so many races to cover tonight that we're probably not going to get to all of them. So I just want to start with what stuck out to you from the results tonight. It could be something that was surprising, that cut against your expectations, or something that wasn't necessarily surprising, but is important for understanding this primary and what happens next. Nathaniel, why don't you kick things off for us? Sure, let's just dive right into it. The polls, man. We

We continue to see this pattern where the polls have been underestimating Haley.

You know, and like Vermont is like a big example. There was one poll in Vermont that we had over the past month that looks like it had a very large error. Trump was winning Vermont by like 27 points in the poll. And obviously Haley ended up winning it. You also had a big polling error in Virginia, which Trump won, but not by as much as the poll said. And this is similar to what we've you've seen in Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina and Michigan, where the polls just kept on underestimating Nikki Haley and

There is there are a lot of people online who seem to think that like means something with a capital M and a capital S. And I'm just not sure that it does. It sure looks to me like pollsters have been and especially for Super Tuesday, like because there just wasn't a lot of polling in general. And like the polling that we had was on the older side. But like pollsters didn't even kind of they haven't come around to the idea yet that.

and now that the primary is basically over, they probably won't, that a lot of independents and frankly, like Biden supporters were joining the Republican primary 'cause there's nothing better to do in their state and voting for Nikki Haley to kind of stick it to Donald Trump. That doesn't seem to have been reflected in pollsters likely voting models, but a lot of people online seem to want to make that about the polls overestimating support

for Donald Trump consistently and that that's going to be the case in the general election too. And it's, let's just not, I mean, the polls could overestimate Donald Trump in the general election, but it's not going to have anything to do with this because modeling a primary electorate is just different from modeling a general election electorate. And,

You can't use past polling error to predict future polling error. From God's lips to my ears. Right. And the Nikki Haley support, which has been, you can't dismiss it.

But a lot of it is coming from the New York Times-Siena poll found that a lot of that support is from people who were already Biden supporters previously, not like Republicans who are going to defect from Trump to vote for Biden, but they were already Biden supporters. Let's just put some numbers to it of the Nikki Haley supporters in the Times-Siena College poll was 48% of Nikki Haley supporters had voted for Biden in 2020 and 31% had voted for Trump.

There's not like a negligible amount who have voted for Trump, but it's a plurality that voted for Biden. Right. But then on the other side of the coin, it's also about the fact that like this happens every year. In fact, most years, the eventual nominee of a party gets less of the vote than Donald Trump is getting right now. And yet the vast majority of that party ends up coming around to Biden.

to the party's nominee because it's many months later. And like that's going to happen with the 2020 Trump voters who are voting for Nikki Haley in this primary. It doesn't mean that they like Donald, they think Donald Trump is the devil. It just means that they prefer Nikki Haley to Donald Trump right now. But like a lot of them are still going to vote for Donald Trump in the fall.

the overwhelming likelihood is that we're going to see the same type of thing where like roughly 90% of Republicans vote for the Republican nominee in the fall. People who believe otherwise, I think the burden of proof is on them to say why this year is different. So yeah, so that's, I decided to pick a fight with my answer right now. He said, I am doing battle with a group of people that aren't even on this podcast, but I respect it, Nathaniel. Tilt at those windmills.

Kaylee, what is your takeaway from the night? Okay, if Nathaniel's not going to defend the down-ballot races, then I'll take up that one. Okay, good. But I think that tonight especially, the down-ballot races ended up being more interesting because the presidential nominations are basically done and basically were done before we came into tonight. But I think that it's really easy to get distracted, you know, once we kind of end the primary season.

very shortly by the top of the ticket. And I think it's worth continuing to pay attention to those down ballot races. I think that that's going to, especially this year when it's like a repeat of 2020, we've got two candidates that like nobody is like particularly excited about. I don't know that like whoever wins is going to tell us that much more

about the American electorate and what they care about and their values and what is important so much as those down-vote races, you're going to see more of those dynamics at play. You're going to see candidates that actually have things that they're battling out that have to do with local politics that people will actually be expressing on. And it'll be really interesting to see what kind of split-ticket voting happens as well, if any.

So yeah, just defending that the down ballot races are going to continue to be interesting and don't get distracted by the top level stuff.

I mean, I don't know if we can say distracted. It is. It does have it does have significant consequences. But Kayleigh, you covered some of the Texas races, previewed them for the site going into tonight. And there was I mean, it got termed basically a civil war within the Republican Party in the Texas down ballot races between competing factions of the party nominating opposing candidates in those primaries. Can we come to any conclusions about which faction won out?

It really depends on the district, which I know is not a satisfying answer. But I think you can tell more about a district by sort of which of those factions won out and what they're leaning towards. And that's why I think it's interesting. You saw that a bit in North Carolina as well. I mean, you know, some districts, all the candidates were kind of from the same cohort.

But others, you know, you had these warring between the sort of establishment sort of old school Republican candidates and the more new Trumpian wing coming in.

I'm thinking of like Kay Granger's district, for example. We ended up with the more traditional candidate winning over the Trumpy mega one. But that's not super surprising given that district. So I think it depends on where you're looking and who's coming out. That's why it's interesting. Part of the reason why I didn't go down ballot with my answer is that like there wasn't clear trend pattern or whatever. Like you had...

like Kaylee mentioned, Kay Granger's district. In North Carolina's 1st District, you had the establishment-backed candidate Lori Buckhout edge out Sandy Smith, who had been accused of domestic abuse and was the party's nominee in 2022 and lost that seat. She was at January 6th, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, right, exactly. And that, I think, was an electability win for Republicans. But then on the other hand, you had, for

For example, in Alabama, the first district there, I mean, that's a safely read seat, but so it's not an electability thing. But the Freedom Caucus aligned candidate who is going to be more obstructionist, he ended up winning Barry Moore, defeating Jerry Carl. So this is an incumbent incumbent candidate.

matchup that was caused by redistricting that threw them both together. And that was mildly surprising to me because Jerry Call had the geographic advantage in that district. It was more of his old district than it was of Barry Moore's. And yet the the kind of more insurgent candidate ended up winning out. So, yeah, just kind of different results based on where you look. Brandon Gill, another candidate who won in Texas's 26th district,

He is Dinesh D'Souza's son-in-law, promoted 2,000 mules on the campaign trail and stuff like that. And for those of us who don't live online, 2,000 mules is a conspiracy theory-based documentary about the 2020 election being stolen. Right.

Dinesh D'Souza's son-in-law is going to be the Republican nominee in this very red district and so is almost certainly going to Congress. So, yeah, just kind of an eclectic mix of establishment and insurgent candidates winning primaries and very likely heading to Congress in the fall.

With Barry v. Jerry in Alabama, too, I think that that was sort of an example of, I mean, they were like battling for who is the most Trumpian throughout their campaign. So it was more towards the other direction of like who can be the most mega in this district. And Barry won out.

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Also down ballot, it looks like Democrats will be saving a lot of money in California because the two candidates who are the top vote getters in the nonpartisan primary or top two primary are Adam Schiff, the Democrat, and the Republican Steve Garvey. And of course, Katie Porter and Barbara Lee were also running in that primary. And the idea was that no one thought Barbara Lee was going to make it through. But if Katie Porter made it through, they would be spending $1.

perhaps tens of millions of dollars nuking each other in a race that would ultimately be won by a Democrat. Instead, Adam Schiff will walk to victory in November. You know, I think, though, to Katie's argument about down-ballot races being valuable, it maybe gets even more interesting when you look further down-ballot in California, because I think starting out,

There's this idea that control of the House runs through New York and California because there are about five districts in both New York and California that could flip. But if Democrats do actually manage to overturn the maps in New York and get a Democratic gerrymander, those competitive districts will become less competitive and more Democratic.

And so the truly competitive districts will actually be more concentrated even in California, putting even more of an emphasis on California determining control of the House, especially in that like Orange County area. Did we get any sense of who the parties were nominating in Southern California? Yeah.

Yeah. So one of the things with California is that the vote count takes a while. So while ABC News and others were able to make projections about the Senate race statewide contest district to district, the sort of the share of the expected vote in is quite varied.

I would say that some of the really pivotal contests that we know are going to be highly contested by both parties in the 47th district, which in Orange County, which is Katie Porter's old seat that she left behind to run for the Senate unsuccessfully. It does look like, although there is no projection yet, but

Scott Baugh, who narrowly lost a porter in 2022, the Republican, will advance. And then it's sort of a question of, will Dave Min, a state senator who's come under fire because he was cited for a DUI last year –

Will he or Joanna Weiss, who's an attorney who has tried to sort of hold that DUI as evidence that men could like blow this Democratic – this district Democrats need to hold on to to have a chance of restoring majority in the House for themselves. Right now, men is up by about eight points, but that's with about half the expected vote in. So in theory, it could still change. There's sort of enough uncertainty there. And then I think the other thing that I was kind of watching –

was would anyone get locked out, which is a word that gets brought up a lot in California politics because of the nature of the top two primary. In districts that are really lopsided for one party, you might see two candidates from the same party advance in California's top two system, which I'll just remind people means that

All the candidates run on the same ballot regardless of party. So in theory, you could have two candidates from the same party advance. Sometimes, though, in competitive seats, if you have a crowded race with multiple candidates from each party, you can end up with two Republicans or two Democrats advancing to the general election, essentially locking out the other party from having a shot at a potentially winnable seat, which in the 22nd district is

which is David Valadao's seat in the Central Valley of California. That's a seat I think a lot of people have had their eye on for this because Valadao only narrowly won to advance, I should say, in the primary in 2022. He's one of the two Republicans left who voted to impeach Trump, and he lost a lot of Republican votes to Chris Mathis, who was this guy to his right who's running again.

And then Rudy Salas, who was the state assembly member who narrowly lost to Valadie out in the November election, a Democrat, is also running again. But then there's another Democrat, a state senator, Melissa Hurtado, running. So you have two candidates from each party. And so in theory, there was the risk that –

Sort of the 2v2 situation that perhaps because of lower Democratic turnout since the Republican presidential primaries of principal interest and the Democratic one, not so much. Also because of lower Latino turnout in a district that is fairly heavily Latino. If there's a Democratic-leaning voters, maybe they don't turn out as much for the primary. That district's had a habit of being more Democratic-leaning once you get to the general election than in the primary district.

The fear was for Democrats particularly that two Republicans could advance out of this seat that Biden would have carried by 13 points in 2020. Like this is a seat Democrats need to win if they're going to take back the majority. So right now we only have like a quarter of the vote in and Valadao and Salas are leading. They're in first and second. So maybe they'll have that rematch. But there's obviously a ton of vote left to count. So we'll just have to see how it pans out.

All right, I think we've done our civic duty by looking down ballot and getting into some of the weeds there. Yeah, sorry, was that long? I didn't mean for it to go so long, but then it really did. Well, now 538 Politics podcast listeners are going to be very invested in California's 22nd District, as they should be. But bringing us back up to the top of the ticket, you know, I think that...

Because these primaries have not been particularly competitive, there has been more of an impulse than usual to try to make sense of primary votes in the context of the general election, which is to say, this is how folks are voting in, you know, New Hampshire, Iowa, and this is the breakdown of the Republican vote. And this means that about who could win in November. And

I just want to say, first of all, to sort of set the table here, looking at Michigan as just one example. Last week, 22% of registered voters cast a ballot in the Michigan primary. In the last presidential election in Michigan in 2020, more than 70% of registered voters cast a ballot. So we're talking about two wildly different elections.

And we know from polling that the, for example, policy priorities of those electorates differ. The way that they view the candidates, they're far less ideological. They're far less tied to one candidate or the other. Many of them don't like either candidate. A lot of them don't pay attention to politics. In fact, one maybe instructive poll from CNN suggests that only 25% of voters are paying active attention to this contest at all at this moment.

And so not to ask a leading question, but do you think that that means it's like fully inappropriate to read the tea leaves for November? Or are there things that you can still pull out and say, OK, I understand that this is not a general election electorate, but these trends stick out to me.

I think it's reasonable to at least sort of have a cursory look at the primary results and wonder about potential weaknesses for the major party candidates. For instance, there was a somewhat higher uncommitted voting share in Minnesota last

uh against biden in the democratic race kind of like we saw in michigan does that maybe suggest that there's some dissatisfaction with biden it has not risen to the level of oh my god you know democrats aren't going to vote for joe biden in mass or something uh to nathaniel's earlier point you know i would expect somewhere around 90 of democrats to vote for biden in the end

But obviously, just how close it is to 90 or how far above 90 is important in terms of who could win the general election. So that's interesting and something to monitor, especially in a state that can be competitive like Michigan or Minnesota. You know, I think for, you know, talking about Nikki Haley winning Vermont is certainly interesting in that, you know, maybe –

This could all delay Trump clinching the nomination by a week. Maybe not. I was doing a little back of the envelope delegate math earlier tonight, and it was like, well, if he ends up on the low end of his potential delegate haul tonight, maybe he could fall short on March 12th, which is the earliest someone could clinch a majority vote.

And maybe you'll have to wait until March 19th. Oh, my. But, you know, the grand scheme of things, it didn't really change anything. So it's sort of I think you have to just kind of be careful to to not overstate things. Yeah, I don't know. I guess I don't see the value in it in that anything that you can glean from these primary elections is.

that is valuable, there's better data, there's better sources to actually evaluate that. So you're talking about, like, Democratic dissatisfaction with Biden, but, like, we already know that. You know, we have polling on that. We have other things to measure that that is more reliable and more instructive than this block of voters that are highly engaged, such a small portion of the overall electorate and so different from the actual voters we see in the general that... I'm not saying it's, like, it's...

all going to be completely inaccurate, but I just don't see the value in it. Right, exactly. Like the uncommitted vote, I think, is a great example. Is that somebody who is angry with Biden enough that they're not going to vote for him in the fall? Or is that just somebody registering a protest vote now and who's going to end up voting for him when, you know, maybe holding their nose? We don't know. And there are better ways to measure general election voting intention.

Yeah. And when you do that, which is done all the time, you find that Donald Trump leads Joe Biden nationally by about two to three points and in the battleground states by about three to five points. And so if you want a picture of the general election, if it were today, there you have it.

I will say, though, that I think there is something of a trend that could be meaningful as far as where we go from here. Because folks will say it's eight months out from Election Day. These polls are not predictive. Historically, they haven't been. And that's just an important caveat to keep in mind.

Also, this is a unique rematch. These candidates are basically universally known. And so impressions of them may be harder set than in past elections, which means those numbers might move less. But again, that could be a theory. It's not like a

Right.

The part of the primary elector on the Democratic side that's got more energy or attention or even organization is a protest vote that's to the left of Biden. And so those folks, when it comes to the general election, well, I mean, maybe they could vote for Jill Stein or not vote, but they don't have a viable option to the left of Joe Biden.

If you consider Nikki Haley's somewhere between, you know, 30 and 40 percent as a protest vote in its own right, which is these folks probably know that Donald Trump is going to be the nominee, but want to sort of register discontent with that eventuality. Those folks are to the left of Donald Trump. Do they have a viable option that is to the left of Donald Trump? Yes, that's Joe Biden.

And so the dynamic at play here in the primaries is maybe suggestive, and please correct me if you think I'm wrong, of a little more pickup opportunity for Biden going forward than for Trump. So on the one hand, I don't think you're wrong about that in the sense that there may be

a sliver of the electorate that the primaries are sort of suggesting is out there. I mean, we know that Biden did win over some Republicans as a part of his sort of broader anti-Trump coalition. At the same time, I think we have to be very careful

Because to the earlier point, the thing we were talking about is that a lot of Biden supporters are voting in the Republican primary because there's not a lot happening in the Democratic primary, which makes it maybe tougher to get a read on just what's happening. Because if you actually like

dive into the few exit polls we have. You know, for instance, in North Carolina, very important state, if Democrats were able to win that, that would be a really big deal for them. And obviously, Republicans want to hold on to it again after narrowly winning it in 2020 and 2016 and 2012, all narrowly. 62% of the electorate identified as Republican. Of those, 85% voted for Trump.

And my guess is that the 14% who voted for Haley, 15% who voted for someone else in general, most of those voters are probably going to come home to Trump at the end of the day if he's the Republican nominee because they identify as Republican. And if you identify as Republican, you're probably going to vote for the Republican nominee. Something that's harder to get into at the exit poll, like is murkier, is who were the independents or something else? Did they lean Republican? Like if you push them, which –

exit poll doesn't do. You know, are they Republican-leaning independents? How did they vote? They probably voted more for Trump than Democratic-leaning independents who clearly voted for Haley. But I would be curious to know the figures for them because they, as people who not openly identify as Republican, they're

even if they usually vote Republican, if they only lean Republican, there is at least some greater chance that they might be voters who would break away from the Republican nominee. And to put a number on that, independents voted for Trump 54% to 40% in North Carolina. And obviously North Carolina was one of Trump's better states, just like much of the South.

In Virginia, they split like 50-50 roughly, independence. It's really a question of, okay, who are these independents? Obviously, they're more highly engaged independents.

In fact, you know, on a different day, they might have even described themselves as a member of the party in which they were voting in the primary of because remember, party ID can fluctuate in terms of how people describe themselves. Two months down the road, someone might be like, oh, I'm a Democrat again, because like the general election campaign has activated their partisanship or what have you, or they've identified as Republican because now they're like, Trump's the nominee, I'm going to back him.

It's getting late, and this is not our only late-night podcast this week. So we're going to close out, but just one final thing before we do. Kirsten Sinema announced today that she is not running for re-election in Arizona, which means that it is going to be a matchup between the Democratic candidate, or very likely to be a matchup between the Democratic candidate Ruben Gallego and the Republican candidate Carrie Lake.

Ruben Gallego had been down in the polls to Carrie Lake when Kyrsten Sinema was still included in those polls before she had announced that she wasn't intending to run for re-election. How does this change the contours of that race, that Senate race, all-important Senate race in Arizona?

You know, it's interesting. I feel like the polls have actually been a little bit all over the place on this race. Some have shown Lake ahead of Gallego in a head-to-head, and others have shown Gallego ahead of Lake head-to-head. Including Kirsten Sinema. No, no, just head-to-head. Both. Well, that's the thing I'm saying. When Kirsten Sinema was in those polls, it seemed like she was pulling more from Ruben Gallego than she was from Carrie Lake. I misunderstood what you meant. Yes, and I think...

polling on like Sinema's favorability backed that up. She had actually slightly better ratings among Republicans than she did among Democrats, despite having formerly been a Democrat.

which, again, the whole reason she became an independent was probably because she was like, well, I'm going to lose the Democratic primary. So she was like, let me test the waters as an independent and see how that could potentially go. So Gallego is probably – it's possible that Lake should be the happier person about this because if that was the case and if that had continued where Sinema was pulling in more Republican-leaning voters as a part of her attempt to win –

maybe those voters now return to lake as the republican nominee yeah i'm not sure who it helps exactly but i agree i think polling was somewhat ambiguous so i've i've pulled up

our Arizona Senate polls page and let's just take a look. Emerson College had Gallego up by seven in a head-to-head, Gallego up by six when you include Sinema. Sinema very slightly took away from Gallego. Noble Predictive Insights had Gallego plus three with Sinema and Gallego plus 10 in a head-to-head. That would suggest it's significantly better for Gallego to have Sinema out of the race.

JL Partners had Lake up by one, including Cinema, and Lake up by two in a head-to-head, which implies that Cinema being gone is good for Lake. Oh, boy. Choose your own adventure. Never mind. Scrap everything I said. No, no. I mean, it's fine. I mean, these are small differences. I would say that it was ambiguous. It seemed like she was pulling votes from both sides. I'm not sure it...

It makes a huge impact on the race other than obviously Kirsten Sinema was never going to win because she was polling as an independent in like the teens and like maybe the low 20s when she had some of her good polls. And she obviously saw the writing on the wall. And I just think in the broader sense, it's just a very interesting... She's just a very interesting case and a very interesting character in that like...

Like she either had a very different vision for how to exist as kind of like a centrist in a swing state, or she was just a principled person who just like was contrarian and wanted to

to be a centrist and didn't care about how it impacted her electorally. But like she went in a very different direction from, say, Mark Kelly, the other Democratic senator from Arizona, who didn't is still like pretty moderate, but like didn't rock the boat, didn't kind of thumb his nose in the face of, you know, progressives or even of like Joe Biden in terms of trying to to like, you know, kind of put a block on a lot of his agenda, or at least he did. So, you know, I mean, there are probably some senators, for example, who want to stop

hr1 but were quieter about it than mansion and cinema were but she just really put herself out there and made herself into a big target and it really just torpedoed her views among democrats if she had made it to a general election as a democratic nominee she probably would have done quite well but like there's a step before that you got to win a primary and and she just went way too far out of the lane of what a normal party candidate can do all right well let's leave things there for tonight thank you kaylee jeff and nathaniel

Thanks, Galen. Thanks, Galen. Sleep well. Thanks, Galen. Thanks for letting me ramble. Likewise. Sleep well. My name is Galen Drew. Tony Chow is in the control room. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Chertavian. And Jayla Everett is our intern. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcast at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet 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. Bye. Bye.

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