The Poll That Ended Dilbert
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for Spotted Chapter this week. So, like, what can you tell us so far? Is it going to be a good book? It's going to be a really good book. Like, the introduction alone is Pulitzer-worthy. Thank you, Galen. Can you write that on the cover of the book? Galen Druk, the introduction alone is Pulitzer-worthy. Are you going to barb the book?

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. Can Marianne Williamson harness love to achieve what no one has in the modern primary era? That is, beat a sitting president for the nomination of his own party? Over the weekend, Marianne Williamson officially entered the 2024 Democratic primary. President Biden has yet to announce his reelection campaign, but every indication is that he plans to do so.

Williamson is very unlikely to be a serious challenger to Biden, but with a majority of Democrats saying in multiple polls that Biden shouldn't run for re-election, could he be vulnerable against the right challenger?

Today, we're also going to round up some election news from the past few weeks. Last week, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot failed to make it to the second round of voting in the mayoral election. Where did things go wrong after she swept every ward in the city in 2019? Also, does Wisconsin's Supreme Court primary or a special election in Virginia tell us anything about the national environment after Democrats appeared to do well? And we've also got a good or bad use of polling example, which was selected by popular demand. So get ready.

Here with me to discuss it all, our editor-in-chief, Nate Silver. Hey, Nate. Hey, everybody. Also with us is senior writer, Amelia Thompson-DeBow. Hey, Amelia. Hey, Galen. And senior elections analyst, Nathaniel Rakich. Hey, Nathaniel. Hey, Galen. How are you?

I am doing well, and I am genuinely very excited today because you were at the event of the weekend. So Marianne Williamson announced her candidacy for president on Saturday at Union Station in Washington, D.C. Nathaniel, you were there. Can you set the scene a little bit for us before we get into the broader debate? What was it like?

Yeah, it was a good event. You know, it felt good to be back on the campaign trail just, you know, five months after I was last on the campaign trail. But no, it was it was at Union Station in Washington, D.C., as you mentioned, which is interesting because she's running against Joe Biden, who, of course, is famous for riding on Amtrak to home to Delaware when he was a senator. So that was an interesting choice.

But it was in a medium-sized room off of the main hall of Union Station, and her team was able to fill it to capacity. The crowd was enthusiastic. I would say it was about half Williamson diehard fans who kind of cheered at her applause lines, and then half people who were there just kind of listening out of curiosity. I talked to one person after the event who said he was there just to check it out, and

And then there were also there was at least one person who was waiting for his train, had a suitcase. So that was pretty funny. And of course, there was a media contention. Can you describe for me what a Marianne Williamson fan is like? What was the crowd like approximately? Right. Like, let's make generalizations here, but we can be polite, like age or gender, race, whatever, like who was showing up?

It was fairly diverse, I would say. I think it skewed younger, which makes sense on one side because, you know, she's kind of challenging Biden from the left and she's, you know, got a host of progressive views. But on the other hand, you know, she kind of came to fame, you know, I think probably when a lot of those people were either not born or not.

really reading her books because, you know, she kind of for folks who don't know, she she became famous in the 80s and 90s for kind of interpreting this new age tome and giving kind of motivational talks on it. She wrote her own books about it. She was on Oprah in the 90s. And so so, yeah, so it was definitely a young crowd. I would say more women than men, but, you know, diverse and, you know, mostly white, but also, you know, somewhat racially diverse, maybe a little bit more than I was expecting. Yeah.

And her speech was good. You know, she is a motivational speaker by profession. So she, you know, knew how to get the crowd going. She had some good applause lines, some good kind of metaphors and, you know, kind of hit a lot of the same points that, you know, you would expect from a progressive candidate about the unfair system that is, you know, reportedly in America today. And also kind of, you know, tinged with a little bit of, you know, her signature, you

you know, kind of floridness in terms of her rhetoric. Battlefield of love. Exactly, yeah. Let's take a listen to a little bit of her announcement speech. I'm so glad that President Trump did not win the last election. That means we didn't go over the cliff. But I'll tell you something, we're still six inches away from it. We are six inches...

We are six inches away from the cliff in terms of the state of our democracy. We are six inches away from the cliff in terms of the state of our environment. We are six inches away from the cliff in terms of the state of our economy. This is not something where you can just tweak it here and have an incremental approach there and try to change things here.

Okay, so while Marianne Williamson made some meme-worthy moments during her first campaign, according to the polling, in August of 2019, she was one of three Democratic contenders, along with Bill de Blasio and Joe Sestak, who actually had net negative approval ratings amongst Democrats.

So as I mentioned, probably not a serious challenger to Biden. But given that the field is likely to be much smaller this time around, lending more attention to any Biden challenger, and that Democrats do have misgivings about a Biden reelection campaign, let's talk about what role she could play and whether Biden, of course, is vulnerable to the right candidate. So first of all, Nate, do you agree with my characterization of Williamson's chances? As being very low? I mean, yes.

Yeah, look, I mean, there was probably a point at which we would have given or I would have given Donald Trump very little chance of winning the Republican nomination in 2016. But I'll put it like this. If Biden is vulnerable, which he might be, we'll talk about that. A more, quote unquote, serious challenger, I think, will emerge who has more traditional credentials or some kind of built in

constituency apart from eccentric people with a mid-Atlantic, as it's called, accent. Nate, are you good at it? Can you do a mid-Atlantic accent? I can't. I'm good at it. No, I can do some accents, but that's not a mononym. Anyone here? Nathaniel? Amelia? Any mid-Atlantic accents on the call right now? I'm from Virginia, so I think I have one if it exists. But I mean, I don't know. You tell me. Do I have a mid-Atlantic accent? Yeah.

No, not mid-Atlantic in the sense of like Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland. Halfway between America and Europe, right? And the UK, right? It's this kind of old, old-timey... Oh, oh, oh, like 1930s movie. Cary Grant. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I love...

That that is called a mid-Atlantic accent. That is the best thing I've learned today. I think of it as like a Connecticut accent. That's amazing. Yeah. Like Connecticut Country Club. I would just say like old film star, which is totally how she talks. Right. It is giving a little bit of, you know, Jacqueline Bouvier kind of not American, not European sort of lost in time. But to the question here.

What role do we see Williamson playing? If indeed everyone agrees that her actual chances are quite low, what role, Amelia, do you see Williamson playing in this campaign? Well, it's interesting because in 2020, when there were so many different candidates running, she really she emerged as a kind of

I want to say kind of like viral goofball. She had these moments like during one of the debates where she said that she wanted to, you know, she would call the New Zealand prime minister and challenge her to some kind of competition of which country could be better. She said some bizarre things about the forces of good and evil. She was getting attention, but it was for being the strong,

strange new agey candidate saying strange new agey things. And there was a place for that in the 2020 primary because there were so many different candidates who were characters and it was kind of just like an additional dimension of this crazy race. What we're seeing this time, I think, is that Williamson is at least so far trying to avoid that characterization of

She's I'll be curious to hear what you think, Nathaniel, but she seems very focused on kind of the Bernie Sanders type of issues, very focused on economic populism, really, I think, trying to be a bit more of a serious candidate than she was in 2020.

But on the other hand, if there's no real competition for the nomination, then there's less of an incentive for people to pay attention to her. And as Nate was saying, I don't think that Marianne Williamson is likely to be the candidate who sweeps in and proves to be a strong primary challenger to Biden because she just doesn't have confidence.

obvious constituencies. And she also does have this reputation now of having been a bit of a strange off the wall candidate in 2020 that everyone remembers. So maybe it's worth then taking a step back here and asking the broader question of like,

Where is Biden vulnerable? Are any of those areas areas where Marianne Williamson could stick her finger in the vulnerability and poke around? And if she's not, who could be that person? So to begin, where is Joe Biden vulnerable as a Democratic nominee?

You know, he's kind of in the center of his party. Right. But there's probably in a primary environment where the left tends to be more engaged than, you know, I mean, a candidate running to his left, the Bernie AOC lane would get some votes for sure. Right. I think not enough to like get 50 percent, but we get, you know, if Bernie ran against Biden, I mean, that would be interesting. Right.

But, you know, the other vulnerability is, does he look like he's not ready for prime time? He goes out there and campaigns and he's fumbling and stumbling and his age comes up. If that's the case, then anyone could win. And Williamson's this weird case where, like, she's not really either of those, right? Because, like, to beat the bumbling, stumbling, fumbling Joe Biden, you have to project some degree of, like, conventional competence, right? That'd be more like the...

The Gavin Newsom campaign, I think Newsom's an overrated politician, but he's the governor of California. And if it's like, well, we need someone to come in, it can't be Kamala because, you know, then then you might get that type of candidate. But she'll kind of serve one comparison you might hear is to Pat Buchanan in 1992, which is.

Isn't quite fair to Williamson in the sense that like Pat Buchanan was like a columnist and kind of like a rabble rouser and she's more eccentric. Right. But, you know, not a traditionally qualified candidate. But, you know, he did got enough votes in 92 that that George Bush, the first looked vulnerable and that, you know, maybe contributed to poor press coverage for him. And then he lost everything.

re-election to Clinton, of course, that's one kind of mode, right? If she goes in and gets 28% of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, in part because she's kind of like a no-name candidate, then you'll have every one of those days will be kind of like a crisis management situation for press relations for Biden. Maybe it doesn't really matter, right? But there's kind of only downside for Biden, I guess. Yeah.

So I wrote about this for the site last week, you know, because we have seen a lot of polls and Amelia has written about this for the site previously. We have seen a lot of polls, more so than historically with other presidents like Clinton or Obama or Trump, showing Democrats say a majority of Democrats say that they would prefer somebody else as their nominee. And when you kind of probe deeper into that, it does look like they are looking for someone who, A, is younger and

And B is more or at least kind of equal to Biden 2020 electable. Somebody I think Democrats are just afraid of Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis, you know, winning winning in 2024. What you don't see is a huge appetite on on his left. So there was a morning consult poll that found that only 21 percent of Democrats voted.

felt that Biden was too conservative. So when you look at Williamson kind of along those metrics, she is challenging him from the left. And like Nate said, I think there is kind of some critical mass of votes to be gotten there, whether Marianne Williamson is the right candidate to get them. You know, maybe she'll get them by default if she's the only progressive challenger. Maybe somebody like Nina Turner or somebody will jump in and split that vote. But it seems like that is not, you know, that's a path to maybe wound Biden, but not to

be a serious vulnerability to him. Someone who I think does fit the bill better would be somebody younger, someone who is similar to Biden ideologically, who is seen as electable, someone like, you know, popular dark horse candidate on this podcast, like a Raphael Warnock or somebody like that, someone who is associated with the establishment, but is more, you know, but it would be seen as electable, obviously, Raphael Warnock having won in Georgia.

Or maybe somebody like Gretchen Whitmer or something like that. The issue, of course, is that that type of candidate is exactly who's not going to run against Biden because the party discipline is very strong within the Democratic Party. It is not an acceptable position to take that Biden shouldn't run for reelection, let alone that you shouldn't support him. And so I think he's kind of immunized from the type of challenge that would be a serious issue for him because of that.

Williamson to kind of talk about her specifically. She I don't think a lot of people consider her electable. She's lost the only two races that she's ever run in for Congress and for president. She has all these kind of

as Amelia said, kind of odd beliefs, including some on vaccines that kind of would, I would imagine, hit differently in the COVID era, especially among a Democratic primary audience. And then in terms of age, she's younger than Biden, but she's actually 70. Like she's not a spring chicken herself. She would be the second oldest president ever elected if she were somehow to get elected. So I just don't think she scratches this itch against Biden. And I have a really hard time seeing the type of candidate who would scratch that itch running.

We should say, by the way, that like Biden has some accomplishments that the left should like. Right. He had student loan relief, although I think it's going to maybe get overturned by the court. A hundred percent get overturned. Yeah. He had a big climate bill, a lot of infrastructure spending. Maybe it's kind of more of a centrist thing. Right. But like some gun reform, election reform, maybe again, it's more wonky centrist. But like Biden has some accomplishments he can

Point two, he wound down the war in Afghanistan. If you're on the left, you probably like that. And so it's, you know, that helps a little bit. I mean, we have mentioned multiple times here that there are polls suggesting that a majority of Democrats don't want Biden to run for reelection in 2024. That seems pretty notable. I mean, Amelia, as far as you're concerned, to ask a popular question in 2016, should we take those polls seriously?

Seriously? Should we take them literally? Like, I think in a way we have been talking about them seriously. But should we also think about them as like, yeah, actually, a majority of Democrats don't want him to run again. And he's truly vulnerable as a result. If Raphael Warnock were to say or somebody else get in, like literally a majority of Democrats might prefer that person.

I think there's the hypothetical world that Democrats are imagining when they answer that question, which is the world where there is basically a younger Joe Biden who is able to run. Like that is what they want. They want someone who is not old and kind of associated with the label of the old Democratic Party to step in and lead the party.

They want that person to be like Joe Biden in key ways. And so, I mean, yes, hypothetically, if someone like Raphael Warnock came in and decided to launch a challenge to Joe Biden, maybe it would go somewhere. As Nathaniel said, I think there is a snowball's chance in hell of that happening. And fundamentally, I think Democrats are not opposed to Biden. They are opposed to Biden

the idea that the same generation, the same old generation of leaders will just keep leading the party forever and that they won't get a new generation of change. They don't like that idea. I think that's what those polls are capturing. And they're also really concerned with this issue of electability. And I think they're afraid that Biden's age makes him vulnerable. This is one of those things that

We see from Democrats a lot where they get worried about whether the person they like is able to be liked by Americans. And so maybe they don't like them because they're afraid other people won't like them. They sort of get twisted up and not. Fundamentally, I think he'd still be a serious contender, even if he was challenged, because I don't think that this is based in a dislike of Joe Biden for himself.

Yeah. And you can see that in the polls, right? In terms of like approval rating, like 80 plus percent of Democrats say they approve of Joe Biden, but there's also this kind of trepidation about him specifically running again and kind of being their standard bearer. And I think that's this kind of unique position that we're in, right? It's not that like he is unpopular within his party. They're just kind of nervous about him. If he were more like,

Mitt Romney, how old is Mitt Romney? Right. But let's say he's like 75. Yeah. Let's say he's Mitt Romney, who is old, but like 75 instead of 80. And Mitt Romney is, you know, a physically fit guy for his age. You wouldn't say that he's like lost a step as you can accuse Biden of having. I mean, you know, I'm wondering how much of it is generational because Romney is like

very much also part of a previous generation, has like literally concerns about like, he is really old and people are worried that like he'll make some big verbal miscue during a debate and then Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis will become president. That's what Democrats worry about.

I think more than the generational stuff. I don't know. Maybe I'm picking, picking mitts too much. Well, it's all related, right? I think it's generational. Yeah, it's, but it's generational in the sense of political generations too, right? I mean, because someone like Joe Biden isn't just in the same generation as Mitt Romney. He's also been in politics forever and he was the vice president and he's just been around for a really long time. Right. I think age works pretty strangely here in the sense that, you

You know, overwhelmingly young voters in 2020 voted for Bernie Sanders, who is hardly younger than Joe Biden when young voters had young options. But some of their younger options were people like, say, Pete Buttigieg or Amy Klobuchar, who didn't necessarily attract the sort of like progressive insurgent mindset that maybe some of those young voters had.

had. I'll also bring up the polls here. It's like in the same polls that are asking folks if they want Biden to run for reelection in 2024, when they give people the option like, oh, who would you vote for in a hypothetical primary? And you can vote for Biden, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, everyone we've talked about here. You still see Biden leading the pack by like 20 to 30 points and Kamala Harris generally coming up in second place. And

So I guess I should ask the question is, does that suggest that even if, say, throw party relationships out the window and all of a sudden, you know, there would be no repercussions for a president's own vice president to challenge him in a presidential primary, even in that kind of situation, do we think Biden would win the nomination?

Right, Kaelin. There's an old expression in politics, which is you can't beat somebody with nobody. And I think this is why, right? This is the problem with asking a question of like, do you want Biden as your nominee or somebody else? Because people can imagine all sorts of different things. People on the left might want somebody who is farther left. People are concerned about Biden's age, might want somebody younger. You know, people who think Biden is too liberal might want somebody more moderate or something like that.

And so that's why I think, no, obviously, if you could throw out those repercussions and a bunch of people got in, like Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg and stuff like that, then I think a lot of that, the anti-Biden vote, for lack of a better term, would be fractured. I think the only way he would be vulnerable is if you could kind of engineer this candidate, like Amelia said, who is basically like fits all of Biden's, like,

checks all of Biden's boxes, but is 30 years younger. And if that one person were the single alternative, I think that you would see a genuine race there. But other than that, it's hard to imagine. So let's say Gretchen Whitmer declares tomorrow, Governor of Michigan, our listeners will know that, and says, it's time for new leadership.

Biden had a great one term, but he's too old. I am young. I am kind of in the center. I will be more electable than Biden, who barely beat Trump last time. Remember. Right. And so pick me, pick me, pick me. Right. Or Josh Shapiro or Gavin Newsom, someone like that. Right. I mean, what odds would you give that candidate?

I mean, Gretchen Whitmer, Democrats would freak out because she's a woman. Gavin Newsom's from California. Josh Shapiro doesn't have enough political experience. All of those candidates have reasons for the Democrats to get their electability, scary feelings and second guess how well that person would do. Shapiro's a man.

Right. I kind of eye rolling a little bit. But no, you're right, Amelia, that like there's going to be Hillary Clinton problem for a long time in the Democratic primaries. Right. For president. But like Josh Shapiro, I think he won by a huge margin and maybe the most important swing state in the country. True. He's only been governor now for a couple of months. But, you know, attorney general experience.

That's pretty impeccable, right? If he's like Joe Biden's too old, I'm going to be younger Biden, right? From Pennsylvania. Although Biden's from Pennsylvania also sort of. I mean-

You know, I mean, that's pretty serious, isn't it? Am I wrong? The tricky part here is that no one knows who Josh Shapiro is. Right. We all know who Josh Shapiro is, but his name recognition nationally is pretty low. I think Gretchen Whitmer is maybe a different story where she's a little better known. But I think Raphael Warnock is maybe even a better comparison point to Nathaniel's suggestion earlier because he has run into basically nationalized statewide campaigns. And so...

especially amongst Democratic primary voters, he's a known quantity. Honestly, if he were to get into the race, run against Joe Biden tomorrow and no one else ran, say even Marianne Williamson got out and endorsed Raphael Warnock,

Ooh, I kind of think I would give him like 60, 40 odds. That high? Maybe that's crazy. I would say, yeah, like I would say like 40% for Warnock, 60% for Biden. Highly unscientific. But like, yeah, like I think that kind of candidate, it would be a real race.

But you just can't engineer that environment in like American politics where people are free to do what they want because say Raphael Warnock gets in tomorrow, all of a sudden Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom are like, well, hell, like if he's going to do it, I should do it too. Exactly. Right. And then we have 2020 all over again. It's a catch 22. It's kind of a prisoner's dilemma is not quite the right word, but like, but it is like, it's not endogenous, right? It's not like, Oh my God, I'm explaining this really badly. Um,

Is it exogenous? The more exogenous, the more vulnerable Biden is, or it is endogenous, right? Like Biden's vulnerability is related to whether or not someone will run against him, right? Like, let's say there are rumors that, oh, behind the scenes, Biden's in really bad shape, right? Can barely read a policy briefing anymore. And he's going to get like

I mean, you saw this with Dianne Feinstein, right, where she had not announced her intention. She has now, right? Had not announced her intention to retire, people were like, this, I can beat her anyway. She's probably not going to run. And so I'm going to go ahead and declare now and have that first mover advantage and not get behind everybody else, right? So like, you know, when Gavin Newsom was kind of quasi running for president,

for the invisible primary last year, then that to me seemed like a very bad sign for Biden. And I knew some was kind of backed off, but like, but you know, I don't know. I mean, even now Biden hasn't declared, I mean, some smart Democrat somewhere should be prepared for an eventuality in which Biden is

unexpectedly, I guess, chooses not to run or has some type of medical episode where he has to withdraw. But then the minute you start actually running, then that spirals and that Biden becomes more vulnerable. If Josh Shapiro or Raphael Warnock declared tomorrow, I mean, believe me, they would have 100% name recognition among political junkies

within a day, right? That would be a major story and speak to Baldwin's vulnerability and then actually make him more vulnerable based on the media coverage and so forth. And so it's kind of all, it's all a little bit nonlinear, I guess. All right. Well, we sadly, or fortunately, I'm not sure, have two more segments to get to in this podcast. I think we could talk about this a lot more. And of course, we will, but let's get to our good or bad use of Poland.

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Plenty of you sent me this poll last week, so we're going to talk about it. The creator of the Dilbert comic, Scott Adams, recorded himself reacting to a Rasmussen Reports poll in February saying racist things like the following. So if nearly half of all blacks are not okay with white people, according to this poll, not according to me, according to this poll, that's a hate group. That's a hate group. And I don't want to have anything to do with them.

And I would say, you know, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people. Just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there's no fixing this.

Hundreds of newspapers have since dropped the Dilbert comic. I'm sure folks have heard about this. And given that this was all based on a poll, we're going to dig into what in the world Adams was talking about. So Rasmussen asked a thousand American adults, quote, do you agree or disagree with this statement? It's OK to be white.

72% of Americans said they strongly or somewhat agree. 17% said they're not sure. 8% said they strongly or somewhat disagree. It appears that Adams was reacting to the crosstabs in this poll, which he apparently misread.

Those crosstabs show 53% of black respondents said they strongly or somewhat agree with the statement, it's okay to be white. 21% said unsure. 26% said they strongly or somewhat disagreed. So Adam's use of this polling is obviously bad and inaccurate. But I'm curious how you would judge the actual poll itself as a use of polling in the first place. Um...

I mean, if I get canceled, it sure as hell won't be for a Rasmussen poll. My God. Although I should say, even as some... Yeah, I mean, it's probably generous to call this a cancellation out of all the things that are lumped together. This seems like kind of like almost like a self-cancellation. It's way beyond the line, even to people like me. Yeah, even to people like me who are like, yeah, the line should be pretty high. This is above that line. But...

Yeah, look, I mean, should I start going through what I think are the problems with this poll? Because there are, in my view, two big ones. Go for it. One is that ask a stupid question and get a stupid answer, right? People are reading this poll or hearing this poll, and they're probably like, what the f*** kind of question is this, right? And it just means kind of that the answers aren't really reliable, right? People might think...

that they're being trolled, so they might troll back, right? You know, I'm not a fan of public

pollsters who do this kind of thing. Public policy polling used to ask like these really trollish questions, right? You know, and so like, yeah, it just kind of like not really like a intelligible question. Is this like a law of polling? Like troll and you shall be trolled? Yeah. Or you ask crazy things, you know, does Bigfoot exist? And some people will say yes, because they're, they're trolling. I think we've talked about that poll on this podcast before. Yeah. I'm almost positive. Number two is that like, I'm not sure Rasmussen is getting like a, um,

reliable sample of black voters anyway. You know, their polls are always Republican leaning in years where Republicans don't have a good year, like 2022, where they are, have been quite bad in some years and better in other years, like 2020. Um, but they always have much higher, um, purported black support for GOP candidates than, than others. Um,

I think one reason why is that people may also intentionally or unintentionally misrepresent their race, right?

They may say, well, like, you know, you might imagine some like anti-woke conservative being like, well, I'm going to pretend to be like a black lesbian woman. Right. And answer all the questions like that. Right. Which is to say that sorry, Nate, which is to say that these polls are conducted online like this. I mean, this isn't a live caller poll. Right.

Rasmussen uses a combination of automated dials and internet. I'm sure it's probably mostly internet now, although I'd have to double check that. But so there's no verification. There's no hard verification against voter records, number one. But also, in general, it's always been hard for pollsters to get Black voters and Hispanic voters to complete surveys. We can talk about the reasons for those. So let's say that only...

95% of your respondents are actually black, right? Let's also say that 95% of your respondents are not black, but a fraction of those are trolls, or they also unintentionally misclicked and clicked the wrong, pushed the wrong button or clicked the wrong button on an internet forum, right? It doesn't take very many polls to then kind of pollute the sample of actual black voters and really skew that crosstab quite a bit.

And with these kind of sloppy, you know, polls like Rasmussen that have low response rates and are going for volume, volume, volume, then I tend not to trust any demographic information from black voters because of that issue, because you're not like verifying anything and because like misclicks and trolls can really swing the numbers quite a bit. Okay. Amelia, what are you thinking about this poll?

I mean, I think Nate pretty much covered it. This is obviously not a good use of polling. And I mean, I just think, you know, setting aside the sample issues, this is not an answerable question.

Like, it's just even if you tried for some reason to answer in good faith, I understand why large chunks of the people who responded to this poll said they were uncertain, just because if you're not aware of the role that this phrase plays in the zeitgeist, which obviously we can and should talk about, I think you would be forgiven for just saying, I have no idea what this is actually asking me.

Yeah. So to your point, Amelia, that, you know, I think the phrase is it kind of sends up your little like, you know, like alarm signal. Like, is this a is this a troll? And also to Nate's point, the background for people who aren't familiar is that, you know, this is a phrase that kind of became popular on kind of the.

you know, in like the white nationalist circles in like 2017 as basically as a troll, as a way to like go people into saying it's not okay to be white and, you know, therefore showing how like racist and anti-white like, you know, the progressives are and winning people over to kind of the white nationalist cause. And as for Rasmussen, you know, they are, they've been kind of

the in many ways kind of the epitome of like a republican uh affiliated pollster for a long time they've been on the scene for a long time but um rasmussen the name the guy scott rasmussen who founded the firm is no longer affiliated with them and um and in fact the people who run um the company now as as shown by this question you know have some like you know very kind of

problematic beliefs and affiliations. They have spread conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and about COVID vaccines on their Twitter account. So, you know, they are kind of apart from any methodological concerns. I think that there are, you know, serious like concerns with trusting them as a source of information. So Rasmussen's response to this, and I don't even know that we should take them at face value, given what you said, is

But that like, oh, you know, if any if something is in the ether, if something's being talked about, we're just going to pull it to which I say, like, when is it not OK to pull something, whether you think it's like getting at something in the zeitgeist or not?

Well, the thing is, this is only in the zeitgeist in white nationalist circles. So like that's your problem right there. If Rasmussen thinks this is this is out there and in the zeitgeist, that's telling on themselves. Fair point. Although a lot of people responding to this poll don't know that. Right. I mean, I personally didn't know that. Right. Exactly. Yeah, I did. Which is why. Yeah. Which is why you saw some weird results.

Well, which is why you saw maybe the vast majority of people saying, yes, it's okay to be white. But like, if I were responding to a poll and someone was like, is it okay to be hungry? I would be like, I can't, I can't answer this, but this isn't like an answerable. Yeah. You'd say you don't know. Cause it's a weird question. Yeah. And we saw a lot of people said they didn't know, not because they're racist against white people. No, look, if they want it in principle, if they wanted to try to like, so lots of people try to pull on racism. It's a hard issue to pull on actually, because people, uh,

don't want to admit racist beliefs, right? If they wanted to poll on that, I would have no problem with it, including, you know, anti-white, I suppose, racism. But instead, they're just like, again, I'm not a big, like, platforming kind of guy, right? I kind of hate that whole mindset. Oh, you're platforming this. But like, it's pretty weird to like, platform a white supremacist meme, in part because like, unless you're very, very, very online and in this one community, you're

You won't get it. Like I thought I was pretty informed about like political memes. Right. And I hadn't, I hadn't known that until it was mentioned five minutes ago. Right. It's, it's very in the weeds and just like, I mean, is it okay to ask that poll question? I, I, I,

I wouldn't like forbid any polling question, I don't think, but like what the are they doing? Why do they think this is a good look when it actually doesn't really answer the question very well because people just kind of scratch their head and are confused by it or think it's a troll. And so it doesn't really, it's just a bad decision to use that prompt to investigate this issue. Yeah, it's not a good faith effort. I mean, that's the thing like Galen, when you say if it's okay to poll on something or not, like

I think if you are making a good faith effort to answer a hard question, like the extent to which different groups of Americans hold racist beliefs, um,

and you actually try to use social science methodology and the methodology of polling to get an accurate answer, which is what pollsters and many social scientists have tried to do on this question, then like, yeah, you can poll on hard things and you have to be sensitive about it. And you also have to think about what will actually elicit a usable answer from people. And the thing about this poll is that it is both clearly a heckle

and is not trying to elicit usable information. And so I think it fails on both counts and it's not a great example of, you know, sort of like pulling on the hard questions or pulling on the things people don't want to talk about because it's not actually telling you any information.

So folks do do polling about racial animus and they sort of, they usually don't ask you straight up, you know, like, are you racist? And if you are, who don't you like? How do social scientists try to get to the bottom of, you know, gauging racial animus amongst the public when it is a good faith effort and not Rasmussen, as you said, Nate, platforming, you know, a white supremacist meme? One way is to embed a racist statement

amidst some other statements, right? Say, how many of the following statements do you agree with? You know, we should have year-round schooling and the Yankees are going to win the pennant. And then insert derogatory stereotype about racial group here, right? How many of those three do you agree with, right? So then you can kind of like implicitly tease it out that way. That's kind of a fancy social science technique. There are also questions where, I'm not sure how to put it, but like some questions like try to like put

a racist sentiment in the best possible light, right? There'll be questions like, well, you know, American groups like the Irish and the Italians, like a longstanding, like, I think general social survey question, work their way up and black people should do the same thing, right? So they're trying to like kind of frame it

And what seems like kind of counterintuitive, right? But like, but trying to make it more comfortable to express that thing that you kind of have plausible deniability about. But yeah, you go into it. And then there's also research about like, what happens if you kind of ask people over the phone versus, you know,

versus online. And kind of even like the perceived race of the interviewer. If you are talking to someone on the phone who you perceive to be of your racial group based on their vocabulary and accent and so forth, then there's lots of research that you may give different answers on some sensitive questions. So it's, you know, sensitive is the word I'm going for. You have to be careful about how you do this, and there's probably never any perfect way to do it, but it's much more careful than

Using a troll, I guess. Right. And and I mean, another way that social scientists will do this is there's something called the racial resentment scale that includes several different questions that try to get at different dimensions of racism. And the question that you were mentioning, Nate, I think has traditionally been part of the racial resentment scale.

But it's also acknowledging that this is not something that you can necessarily get at in a single question and that there are different dimensions to racism. You also might be getting different information from people when you ask them different questions. And so you might actually have to approach this in multiple different ways and then,

look at the findings and people would land somewhere on a scale rather than saying, you know, yes, this person is racist. No, this person is not racist. So in preparing to talk about this, I actually came across a citation of the American National Election Studies Survey, which the ANES survey is something that we use a lot here. They actually ask Americans to rate other races on a scale from zero to 100. It's called, you know, like...

thermometer polling or whatever, where you ask like, how warmly- It's a feeling thermometer. Feeling thermometer. Yeah. Like how warmly do you feel about this group of Americans? And they ask, you know, the different sort of racial segments of society, how they feel about all of the other racial segments of society. The good news is folks that in general, Americans feel warmly about each other across all racial lines. There are like, there's some differentiation and people have felt less warmly about white people over time, over the decades. If you look at sort of the trend lines.

But I thought that was sort of the most blunt version of this question that I saw asked by a reputable organization.

Yeah. And I think that's an example of a good faith effort. And, you know, one that the scale at least is, is, you know, nuanced. But I would be worried that that is too direct of an approach and that it is subject to social desirability bias. Right. I don't think I think, you know, you would probably see some people rating other races higher than they maybe honestly would because they think that's the answer they're supposed to give.

I mean, it is kind of a spectrum. I mean, it's interesting to know how many people are openly racist in some ways. It's also interesting to know how many people are like implicitly racist or kind of quietly racist. And then there's questions that like get into questions of public policy that some people would define as reflecting a racial view and some wouldn't, right? Like questions about like affirmative action or something, right? So all these things are useful, but like,

You know, there's not like one magic number that you're going to get that says, oh, 29 percent of white people are racist because like because it very much is like a spectrum. All right. Well, this was an interesting conversation. I think we can say bad use of polling as far as Rasmussen reports is concerned. Also, horrendous use of polling as far as Scott Adams is concerned.

Goodbye, Dilbert, I guess. I don't know. I don't think I've ever read a Dilbert comic in my life. But to listeners who were fans of Dilbert, I'm sorry that you had to go through this. But thank you for alerting us to this poll because it was made for an interesting conversation.

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A quick election roundup. So last Tuesday, as folks probably know, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot failed to make it through the first round of voting in the mayoral election. Instead, moderate former head of Chicago Public Schools, Paul Vallis, will face off against progressive Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson in April.

So let's discuss the results in the election and a couple of other recent elections and see if we can extrapolate anything from them that will tell us something more about national politics. So first of all, why did Lori Lightfoot lose re-election?

Well, she was elected in 2019 as an outsider who was going to come in and shake up the city and not work in the old systems. And she was also the first black woman to be elected Chicago mayor. And then the pandemic happened. And it turned out that maybe people didn't want an outsider after all, and the fact that

she was a black woman, activated a lot of race and gender stereotypes because especially being mayor of Chicago, I think it's safe to say that that is a job that is hard to get done without having a pretty abrasive personality. And because of the pandemic, there's been a lot of debates about crime in Chicago. Those debates are racialized and we should talk more about that.

But basically, people had really turned on her such that she didn't even make it into the runoff, which is pretty crazy for an incumbent. Yeah, I think the big picture answer is, you know, the pandemic and then the kind of crime spike that we've seen in

in cities across the country. The more specific to Chicago answer is that she just lost her base. If you look at the map of the 2019 election, you know, she was the kind of candidate of the progressive, you know, kind of white community in Chicago.

Chicago on the north side, and she completely lost those people this time around. And she in addition to kind of having a reputation for burning bridges with people and her abrasive style, as Amelia mentioned, she also was seen as not delivering on a lot of the kind of more progressive promises that she made.

During her 2019 campaign. And in fact, this time around, she was she had like a line that she was like, I will never defund the police, which obviously defunding the police is, you know, to some extent, a caricature of the progressive position. But she was very much running away from from the progressive side of things in that regard.

I mean, the crime rate in Chicago is like much higher than New York and the homicide rates in the past couple of years have been higher than they had been for most of the years before that. Right. So there's something there's something real there. And, you know, yeah, crime statistics can be misunderstood and they can be kind of memefied and things like that. But like, yeah.

If you're the mayor of a city where there are lots of murders, then you tend not to get reelected. It's kind of one of those basic and maybe it may be the most basic issue for a mayor's race is crime. And then maybe after that is, you know, what happens to the event of like big weather, like winter storm kind of things. How do you respond to that? But, you know, I mean, I think I think there are a lot of politicians who kind of are associated with the pandemic and, you

You know, maybe there's resentment toward this unhappy period in the pandemic when there were significant lockdowns, even though at the time, I mean, the lockdowns were not unpopular per se, but they become, I think, less popular in retrospect. And so I think there's something there, too, which is people associate her with these unhappy memories of, you know, of spring 2020, right?

It's so funny, though, because I was living in Chicago in when the pandemic hit, I moved at the end of the summer of 2020. And I remember people had these cutouts of Lori Lightfoot, like sort of, you know, like, like life size cutouts of her sort of looking stern, and she had her arms crossed, and they would put them up in the windows. And she was kind of this

I don't know, not like pandemic mascot, but she was someone I think her her sternness on the pandemic was seen as this thing that was that was kind of good at the time. And she's, you know, telling people to wear their masks and to stay indoors. And that obviously curdled over the pandemic.

the two years that passed and i think you know crime statistics are are hard to to parse out and it's easy to you know look at one in a vacuum against another one um but i think it's noteworthy you know people talk a lot about the homicide rate in chicago um i was looking at some data though from the ufc crime lab that was showing that reported incidents of for example

motor vehicle theft are also up significantly from 2021. And that's the kind of theft that, or that's the kind of crime that people are more likely to notice in their everyday lives. So I think the perception that Chicago was becoming a more dangerous city is something that definitely hurt Lightfoot quite a bit and probably helped her lose key parts of her base, as Nathaniel was saying.

I mean, the other thing that's interesting to look at here are the two options that Chicagoans chose instead of Lori Lightfoot because they didn't just move more conservative en masse as a result of crime, as folks might think would be the result based on our conversation. They sort of split in two different directions, which is, you know, Paul Dallas, one of the folks who's going to the runoff.

He was endorsed by the police union. He's seen as more moderate to conservative, has even suggested at one point that he may be more of a Republican. And then Brandon Johnson, the Cook County commissioner, he's a progressive. He's African-American himself. He was endorsed by the teachers union, sort of notably endorsed by the teachers union because Lori Lightfoot sort of went to war with the teachers union early on in her tenure that resulted in a teacher's strike that lasted for several days. And so even the more progressive teachers

organizations within the city turned to somebody else. And then she also didn't have, you know, didn't compete with Paul Vilas, I guess, on those sort of more conservative, harder on crime and policing sort of thing. So I guess I'm curious what folks make of that split as well in Chicago. Well,

I mean, it makes sense to a certain extent because I never really understood this sort of idea of progressives coalescing around Lightfoot. I mean, she's a former prosecutor. She was never someone who was actually super progressive on issues like police reform. She was maybe more progressive compared to the person who she ended up running against in the runoff election. But I...

I think just generally where she landed in terms of her politics, which was fairly foreseeable when she got elected, was that she's not liberal enough for the people who are really progressive in Chicago, but she's too liberal for the more conservative Democrats. And so in that sense, the fact that this split happened makes some sense based on the city's politics.

Yeah, I don't think that the progressive vote necessarily, you know, those people became more conservative. Obviously, I think they just split. You know, you saw, you know, Brandon Johnson get a good chunk of, I think, people who voted for Lightfoot in 2019. Then you also saw Congressman Chuy Garcia vote.

who is, you know, maybe a more, I guess I would say, like establishment aligned progressive, who also he finished fourth, but with a decent chunk of the vote, I think it was like 14%. So certainly, you know, the progressive bloc still accounted for a good chunk of the votes. Yeah, I mean, you can see if you look at the map, right, Vallis is doing better in the kind of outlying most suburban parts of Chicago. You know, he is, I think, the most conservative candidate, at least to the top four.

So it's not a huge surprise. And remember, like in these like big multiracial urban cities east of the Mississippi, I mean, there was like a New York Times piece today on how much like the Asian vote

shifted in New York in the governor's race, right? You know, voters of color in these major democratic cities are not particularly progressive on average, right? They're often pretty moderate. And so the mayors often tend to be pretty moderate. In the West Coast, you have more immigration and it's like a little bit different maybe. Although even in San Francisco, you've had some backlash to progressive candidates.

But these big blue cities are much more moderate, even the Democratic electorate, than I think people assume, especially with respect to local issues such as policing. Yeah, I would. I think also on the West Coast, Nate, like you saw in Los Angeles, we've now had the kind of the between New York City and then Los Angeles and now Chicago, the three biggest cities in the country, have now kind of come down to these runoffs between cities.

conservative democrats people who have been or have flirted with being republicans in the past before they kind of decided to jump into city politics versus the more progressive option in new york of course eric adams who was the more conservative choice he won in los angeles karen bass who is the more progressive choice she won although that

race was also close. And now kind of, I guess we're getting the rubber match in Chicago, but yeah, this is clearly a theme in, in urban politics that, you know, and we've beaten this drum at five 38, that deeply democratic does not mean deeply liberal or progressive. And one more thing too, is that, um, if you are in a city where, uh, 80% or so of the presidential vote goes to Democrats and likewise, the congressional vote, um,

the most important election may be in Democratic primaries, right? So strategically, you might be a moderate or even a moderate conservative. You would still strategically want to register as a Democrat because it's the only game in town. The Democratic primary is to factor the general election in one of these races. Yeah.

Yeah, you see this in deep blue states like Massachusetts and Rhode Island, where it's basically a one-party state, but a lot of the Democrats are people who would be Republicans in other states. And even think about a state like Kansas, where there's been a longstanding rift between the moderate Republican faction and the conservative Republican faction. So I do think that when one party kind of captures Republicans,

a political jurisdiction, a lot of people who might normally associate with one political party gravitate toward the other one and try to kind of change it from within.

All right. So it sounds like there were some national takeaways from this race. And of course, we will track what happens in April in the runoff. But let's talk briefly about the Wisconsin Supreme Court first round of voting and then also that special election in Virginia. So, Nathaniel, you have been tracking these elections recently.

Basically, one of the takeaways, at least on the Internet, on elections, Twitter, was that turnout amongst Democrats appeared to be quite high in the first round of voting in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election. And the question is now, hey, is that good for the liberal candidate? And I'm not going to try to say her name because it is complicated and I know that you know how to say it. Protosawitz. Protosawitz. Protosawitz.

So can we actually learn anything from this first round of voting's primary in Wisconsin?

Yeah, I would say not much. So as you mentioned, you know, so this was the primary for the general election for Wisconsin Supreme Court, which is coming up in April, which I'm going to go out on a limb and say is the most consequential election of 2023, given that control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court is at stake. And there are kind of decisions coming down the pike on issues like abortion and redistricting.

But so this was the primary and the two liberal candidates combined for 54% of the vote and the two conservative candidates combined for 46% of the vote. And as you mentioned, a lot of liberals and Democrats were excited about that, thought that it voted well for the future. And I don't know, I took a look at

past primaries and then general elections for Wisconsin Supreme Court. And the two margins don't really look a lot like each other. So, for example, in 2016, in the primary, the kind of liberal block, the liberal candidates together beat the conservative block by 11 points, but then the conservative won the general election by five points.

And if you're an optimistic liberal, you can say that actually I went back five elections in Wisconsin and in four of those five elections, the general election electorate was more liberal than the primary one. But the margins, I

I think the main takeaway is that the margins are just very different. On average, the margin shifted by 11 percentage points and some, you know, it went right one time, it went left, you know, a couple of times. And, and so I think generally drawn conclusions about the general election in Wisconsin, um, are, um, you know, you shouldn't do that from the primary. I think there are other reasons. Hopefully there'll be, there'll be polls conducted of the race. You know, we've already seen, um,

A lot of spending on the liberal side that, you know, I think I'm more convinced by that as giving Janet Protese what's the liberal candidate advantage. But yeah, we'll find out soon enough.

Well, and liberals also kind of got the opponent they wanted in Daniel Kelly, right? I mean, this is someone who had been appointed to the Wisconsin Supreme Court to fill a vacant, to fill the position of someone who was retiring and then ended up losing quite embarrassingly in an election in 2020. And he's someone who in his past writings has said,

criticized same-sex marriage. He compared affirmative action to slavery. You know, this is not someone who liberals are going to have trouble painting as extreme. The conventional wisdom is that liberals are fairly heavy favorites here, right?

Yeah, I would say the race leans liberal, but I'd certainly say it's more because of the gulf in candidate quality, as Amelia mentioned, and the fundraising differential than anything from the first round. But you also have like now Democrats are super college educated, right? And for like an off year Supreme Court election, they're much more likely to...

you know, if you're a political junkie, you're much more likely to understand the importance of this race to state and even national politics. I mean, so you'd say lean if I gave you three to two on Daniel Kelly, would you take it? No, but that's that's the different. That's that's the line between three to one. Maybe. OK, so we're on the lean, lean, likely fringe. Yeah, that's what I would say. That seems fair. That seems fair.

One final election before we go. It sounds like with this, folks are going to just have to hold their horses. But we got results in a special election in Virginia, which I think you argue, Nathaniel, might tell us something more about the national environment than this Supreme Court primary.

Yeah. So folks who are longtime listeners, the podcast know that special elections can be predictive of future political or current political environments. You know, we saw this with a fairly abrupt shift toward Democrats in special elections after the Dobbs decision. We saw this in 2018.

And I should say special elections results above kind of what would be expected. So like Democratic overperformance over partisan lean in this case. And in Virginia's fourth congressional district, the first special election of 2023, Democrats had a very impressive overperformance. It is a partisan lean of D plus 29.

And Jennifer McClellan won by 49 points. So, but the thing about that is that it's just one special election. We always say that you kind of need to have a bigger sample size. Weird things can happen in any one special election, like big gulfs in candidate quality. McClellan had run for governor. I think she was a particularly strong candidate. So TBD on that one. But, you know, it's something we're keeping an eye on is kind of which party overperforms in special elections this cycle.

All right. Well, we will continue to log that data as we get it, but let's leave it there for today. Thank you, Nate, Amelia, and Nathaniel. Thank you, Galen. Thank you. Thanks, Galen.

My name is Galen Druk. Anna Rothschild is in the control room. Tony Chow is on video editing. Chadwick Matlin is our editorial director. And Audrey Mostock is also helping out with audio editing. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Or you can tell someone about us. Thank you for listening, and we will see you soon.