The Sun Belt Shifts Away From Biden
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When I hear historical reenactment, I think like Civil War or some kind of like Lord of the Rings, Renaissance Faire, whatever. Not an historical thing, the Lord of the Rings. LARPing, they're LARPing. Okay, you're saying that they have literally cast people to play like the auditors at Arthur Anderson who obscured the Enron. So they're like, you play auditor one, you play auditor two. And they're like,

Okay, let's obscure the fraud going on at Enron. Historical reenactment might have been misleading.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. Three months ago, as the presidential primaries were getting underway, President Biden was trailing former President Trump in the polls nationally and in battleground states. And concerns about his age were coming to the fore. A special counsel report had recently come out describing him as a, quote, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.

The optimistic view for Biden was that once the presidential primaries were over and it became clear that the choice was a 2020 rematch, the polls would move in his direction.

In the time since, the primary has ended. Biden gave a fiery State of the Union address and spent weeks campaigning in battleground states and millions on ads. But the polls have changed little. In fact, this morning, Monday morning, a new set of battleground polls from the New York Times-Siena College shows Biden trailing in all but one of the battleground states, with a lead for Trump as high as 12 points in Nevada.

So what calculus are voters making? And is there anything Democrats can do about it? That's what we're going to discuss today. We're also going to preview some primaries in Maryland and West Virginia, in particular, a very competitive Democratic Senate primary in Maryland. Here with me to discuss it all is senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich. Welcome, Nathaniel. Hey, Galen. Also here with us is senior elections analyst Jeffrey Skelly. Welcome, Jeffrey. Good morning, Galen.

And AP Politics reporter Leah Askaranam. Welcome, Leah. Hello. Lovely to see you all. It's lovely to see you too. I'd just like to note how much more excited Galen was when he introduced Leah than when he introduced Jeffrey or me. We're old hat. That must be hard for you guys. I'm really sorry. It's just...

I love all of you equally. There are no there's no distinction in my mind whatsoever. I'm happy that all three of you are joining me this morning. And I'm excited to talk about the New York Times Santa College polling. So with that, let's talk about the state of the presidential race. And I feel pretty certain, although this poll has only been out for a lot of hours at this point, that this is going to get a lot of attention. And so I'm just going to share those numbers at the top. And then we can dig into it a little bit

more. So among registered voters in Nevada, as I mentioned, Trump leads by 12. In Georgia, Trump leads by 10. In Michigan, by 7. In Arizona, by 7. In Pennsylvania, by 3. And then Wisconsin is the only state in which Biden leads, and that's by two points.

So our averages that we launched a couple weeks ago are a bit closer than that, except in Wisconsin. But I should say here that the addition of these historically high quality polls to our averages this morning shifted them noticeably. If you go and look, you will see a little break in our averages where the polls have been added in. And the picture now looks worse for Biden overall.

on the whole, in the battleground states. And so I know that oftentimes with these things, we say, put it in the average and move on. We have put it in the average. It has changed the picture accordingly. And so I'm curious just to start what your other takeaways might be from this poll, given it's a pretty high quality poll and has shifted our averages. Nathaniel, let's start with you.

It is just further evidence, which you can also see in our averages and from other polls, that it looks like Biden's best path forward is through the Midwest rather than through the Sunbelt states. So he is more competitive in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania than he is in Arizona, Nevada and Georgia.

I think a lot of that is due to, which I'm sure we'll talk about, the fact that kind of New York Times-Siena polls have been among the loudest in terms of sounding the alarm bell for Biden about his erosion of support among young voters and non-white voters, which, of course, there are a lot of black voters in Georgia, Latino voters in Arizona and Nevada, more white voters in the northerly states.

So that was one thing. And then I think the other interesting thing was that they also asked about Senate matchups in some of these key states like Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and, uh, Democrats actually led, uh,

narrowly in those matchups, even as Biden was trailing. And so I thought that was an interesting disconnect. And you could read that, you know, either optimistically for Biden in terms of, oh, there are kind of a lot of voters here who are open to supporting Democrats, but they just haven't come around to Biden yet. And they'll kind of come home

as the, you know, election draws closer and the stakes become clearer. Or you can read it pessimistically, which is that, well, there's something holding these voters back from voting for Biden. And it could be the fact that, you know, the like dissatisfaction with the war in Gaza or, um,

You know, just like the economy generally has a handling of the presidency generally. I think there's an interesting debate to be had about whether those numbers will come more into sync and maybe the Democratic Senate candidates will get dragged down by Biden. Leah, did you have any different takeaways or views as to which is the correct take on what Nathaniel said? Well, first off, love that they polled the Senate races. That was just chef's kiss. Excited to see those numbers. Everybody, please follow suit. What...

saw in looking at the Senate results versus the presidential results. I think more than kind of figuring out if

this is an issue of like the Democratic Party brand or the Republican Party brand. Like, I think it shows that Republicans are pretty united and Democrats are not. Because if you look at each individual state where there was Senate polling, let's put away margins for a second, who's leading and who's not leading. And let's talk just about share of the vote. I think focusing too much on margins

especially when we're comparing margins of the Senate race to the presidential race, can get us into some tricky territory. I think in general...

like when you can use share of the vote, not margin in general, but especially here. So if we're looking at the share of the vote in the Arizona Senate race, Trump got 42%. The Republican nominee also 42%. Trump got 41 in Nevada. This is among registered voters. I should clarify. There's also a likely voter sample. In Nevada, Trump has 41. The Senate candidate has 38. Pennsylvania, Trump 40%.

Senate 41. And in Wisconsin, Trump has 38. The Wisconsin Senate Republican candidates has 40. So they're really close to each other, right? Like they're just within like zero to three points of one another. So what that means is that the people who are voting for Trump are also voting for the Republican Senate candidate in these key states.

With Democrats, you have this huge chasm separating the Senate candidates and the presidential results and where Biden is. In Arizona, you have a Senate Democrat, 45 percent, Biden, 33 percent. Nevada, the Democratic Senate is 40 and Biden is 40.

Biden is at 27. So that can tell you a couple of things. One, potentially, like Nathaniel said, that President Biden could drag down Democratic Senate candidates. I don't really think Joe Biden's going to get 27 percent of the vote in Nevada. I think he could lose Nevada, but I don't think he's going to get 27 percent of the vote there. Something else is happening. And I think the question is, what happens to that

Additional 20% of the vote that is not going to go to Trump, but maybe won't go to Biden or it's not going to Biden yet. So all that's to say, I think my bottom line for this is that Republicans, as usual, seem to have a much higher floor.

And Democrats have a much lower floor. I think this is an interesting point that you make, Leah, because this is actually the reverse of what happened in 2020, which is that in 2020, congressional Republicans ran ahead of Donald Trump. The reverse of that is Biden ran ahead of congressional Democrats. And now it looks like Democrats, the generic Democrat, Democrats in general are doing better than Biden.

And on one hand, you could take Nathaniel's position, which is that means that there's a clear segment of the electorate that Biden can pick up ground with. But at the same time, you can take the argument that the reason Donald Trump lost in 2020 was because he couldn't hold even with the rest of the Republicans running that year. And if he could, there's yes, split ticket voting has declined, but it still exists to the extent that in a close election, it can make the difference. And so if Biden cannot close that gap,

he could see a similar result to what Trump saw in 2020, which is that Democrats may do just fine in the Senate or the House, but he may still lose the election nonetheless. I was also struck by the gap between what you saw in the Senate race and presidential race numbers. And having written extensively about split ticket voting, I'm extremely skeptical that the gaps will be remotely as large as they are in some of these.

I did think it was rather striking that a large percentage of people seem to think that like the system needs to be sort of torn down or major changes and that people were more likely to say Trump would do that. That actually – that part isn't surprising to me. Biden, a longtime politician, is not somebody who strikes people as like –

dramatic change. But I do think it's interesting that in this poll that you would have a preference for a potentially very disruptive changemaker in Trump. And I think that just speaks to the like, because that's actually the thing is that slightly more people said that they did think that Trump would bring about somewhat or very good change versus somewhat or very bad change.

And I just think it speaks to people are very dissatisfied about particularly the economy. And I don't know if Biden making the case for the economy is having really any effect. So like to me, it's like looking ahead and looking at the numbers in this poll, it's like it does this campaign focus more on abortion because that seems like a place where Trump has potential weakness.

And so I think it'll be interesting to see if like the ads we see moving forward from Biden's campaign reflect these realities. Jeffrey, to your point, a couple other polls came out in the past week that caught our attention. And one of them was from Politico Morning Consult, which asked the.

Americans who they think had done more to promote infrastructure improvements and job creation. And of course, this is one of Biden's biggest arguments in his favor, given the record job growth and bipartisan infrastructure bill that he signed into law. According to the poll, 40% of registered voters said Biden had done more. 37% said Trump

And that's within the margin of error of the poll. So on what you might have thought would be Biden's strongest argument, there appears to be almost no advantage or whatever advantage does exist is within the margin of error.

Also, in recent polling, it seems clear that people have a sense of nostalgia or rose-colored glasses when thinking about Trump's economy. So shortly before the election in 2020, according to a Marquette Law poll, Trump's approval on the economy was net positive three. Today, it is net positive 31 when people think about how the economy was on his watch. And so to your point, it seems like, and look,

the Biden administration has been making its case. It's been out in battleground states talking about building bridges and chips factories and job growth and all kinds of things over the past two months or so. And it doesn't seem like voters are picking up the message. Why? Inflation. Ha ha ha ha ha!

I think it's one very simple word. I think inflation has been Biden's biggest political problem and it has not gone away, even if it has slowed down. The price increases that we've seen, they still remember what it was like even two, three years ago. And so it's still like sticker shock to people. And even if they – I think there's – we've talked about it before. Like would there be sort of a gradual adjustment to like a new reality? But at the same time, I think the problem for Biden is that

He as president ends up owning that inflation and that might be a difficult thing for him to overcome. And I think Nathaniel, you had a tweet from Nate Cohn about like what were like the key issues or the issues that people are most likely to cite as important. And it was like the economy, immigration, then inflation specifically. Yeah.

Depending on how you ask that question, we have seen inflation often lead as the most important issue. Yeah, exactly. And that was specifically among voters who had voted for Biden in 2020 but told the New York Times-Siena College that they were no longer supporting Biden. So there were a lot of interesting things about that tweet. But yeah, Nate Cohn of The Times said,

helpfully broke down those numbers for us. And yeah, it was number one was the economy. Number two is immigration. Number three was inflation, specifically, as you mentioned, Jeffrey. So yeah. And I have one, of course, reason that that is interesting as well is that obviously there's been so much discourse about whether, you know, Biden's left flank is abandoning him because of disapproval over his handling of the war in Israel, Gaza, and, you

The reality is that while I think it was about 13 percent of Biden defectors did cite foreign policy and the war in Israel as their most important issue, it really is dwarfed by voters who are souring on him because of the economy, first and foremost, but also immigration. Yeah, I think the question is, I mean, the president owns the economy in voters eyes. That's always been the case.

Here in this poll, we have, you know, some of those voters who are supporting Democrats for Senate. You know, some some are probably supporting third party candidates. Some said, I don't know. Is there a world in which, though, these voters go and put in a Democrat for Senate and leave the presidential ballot?

Seems unlikely. Well, the tricky bit here, of course, is that RFK Jr. is still pulling in 10 percent of the vote in the presidential ballot in this poll. But it doesn't look like he it's it's not like he's pulling disproportionately from Biden, though. Yeah, it's well, it varies. It looks like in a couple of states he's pulling more from Biden and other states it's more even. But it's not overwhelmingly the sort of motivator behind this dynamic.

The split ticket voting thing is where I'm getting caught up. Like, I don't know if this is an example of split ticket voting as much as it's an example of voters being decided on the Senate ballot and not decided and not satisfied on the presidential ballot. That doesn't mean it's good news for me.

for Biden. It's just different news than split ticket. When I think of split ticket, I'm thinking Joe Biden wins Maine and so does Susan Collins or looking ahead, Sherrod Brown wins Ohio and so does Donald Trump, which like, I mean, might need to happen for Democrats to keep the Senate majority.

So that's that's not what this is. This is something a little bit different. And so I'd caution against calling it split ticket voting. I think instead it's like a deep dissatisfaction with Biden and a hesitancy or reluctance to therefore crossover to Trump.

Well, yes, it's also the case that it is not split ticket voting because nobody is voting yet. This is a hesitancy and a reluctance that could result in split ticket voting or an under vote at the top of the ticket that like wouldn't be totally shocking or just all around decreased turnout. But one of the results may be split ticket voting. Like only time will tell. I

I just wish I could verbalize the face that Jeff made when you said less voting at the top of the ballot. I just want, it was a... He doesn't believe that it's going to happen. It was a face of no f***ing way. Okay, speak.

But again, again, it happened to some extent in 2016. And if we are talking about 80,000 votes that, okay, in the places where we saw the biggest swings in the country from Romney to Clinton, we saw a significant undervote at the top of the ballot. I mean, not significant. We saw a higher undervote than you would normally expect at the top of the ballot, which that in some of these,

highly educated suburban areas that were swinging significantly towards Clinton, people were in fact showing up and voting for Senate and House and not voting for president. Obviously, that is not going to be

the biggest factor or anywhere close to it in this election, but you have to add it all up. The people who undervote at the top of the ticket, the people who cast a vote for a third party option, which obviously extends beyond just RFK Jr. And also, you know, obviously potentially people who don't turn out at all, but then that doesn't lead to any split ticket voting. That's just lower turnout. The turnout thing, I think, is the bigger question. Yes. Because I just think that people, the people who

Really, it's people who are just not going to show up because the presidential race has frustrated them and then they're not going to vote in the down ballot race. But again, in a place like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, if the average gap between sort of Senate and presidential in recent years has been three points. I mean, three points is enough to end up with a split ticket ballot in these close states.

OK, let me ask this question, because a couple of months ago when it became was started to become clear who the matchup was going to be between Biden and Trump and Biden's age issues about his age were coming to the fore.

Jeffrey, I think you and I both said like, okay, we'll see. Democrats are saying that the polls are going to shift in their favor now that it's clarified. But if that doesn't happen, that there will be a coming freak out that if we get to May, June, and the polls haven't shifted towards Trump, there will be potentially pandemonium in the Democratic Party. Now, the New York Times Center College polls do have a little bit of a history, at least narratively, of making the Democratic Party freak out a little bit.

I don't want to get too much into the history here, but in late 2019, when Elizabeth Warren, Senator Elizabeth Warren, was very close to leading in the polls over Biden in the Democratic primary, a poll came out suggesting that Biden was the only person amongst the Democrats running who could beat Donald Trump. And electability at the time was the prime motivator for Democratic primary voters.

And we saw, you know, we could do a whole narrative podcast on whether or not these two things were related. But we saw a significant drop in the polls for Elizabeth Warren in the wake of all of that. There is an influential or loud portion of the Democratic Party that pays a lot of attention to these kinds of polls. And the averages back it up anyway. So are we on the verge of a Democratic Party freakout? Is it time for pandemonium? I mean, you don't think it's...

like just a state of being now for the Democratic Party? I mean, okay. No, I feel like there was a vibe shift post State of the Union address and people calmed down a little bit, but I don't know anymore. Point number one, point number one here. It's not the polls that are making people in general freak out. It is some...

some of the analysis of the polls. There is not a poll that says Elizabeth Warren can't defeat Donald Trump. There is not necessarily a poll that says that David Trone is the only person who can beat Larry Hogan. You had a couple polls that had head-to-heads with candidates who, some of whom were better known than others, some of whom had, like, there's a million different factors.

So it's not the numbers. It's like, hmm, it is analysis that is not precise enough is what I will say here instead of the actual numbers themselves. These are helpful numbers. It is six months away from the election.

We can learn a lot about the state of the race. These polls are not telling us who is winning and who is losing right now because the result in Arizona is not going to be Donald Trump 42, Biden 33, up by nine. Sorry, not like maybe it will, but... It's not going to be. To that question, if, for example, by dint of the analysis or the numbers themselves,

Get a frickin' ceasefire.

I don't know. I'm thinking about like you're bringing Democrats home. You're trying to figure out the easiest routes to like strengthening your position. It's like create less intra-party discord. And while I just wrote a piece about how at the end of the day, like young voters care about other things more than the Israel-Gaza conflict. To me, it is like the clearest immediate source of discord.

intra-party discord for Democrats. And I think the fewer of those things you have, the easier it is to unify your party. So if I'm just thinking about things that could matter in the next few months that Biden – how much control does Biden have over this? I don't know. But the point is he probably could have – is more likely to be able to have personal ability to push forward with some sort of

pause or even end to the conflict in Israel than he is to magically like fix the economy because there are a lot more levers in that. Right. So if you're just sort of thinking about the like easiest ways to make the party less divided over something, and this is an issue that does divide the Democratic Party, even if it is down the list of things that voters are like most attentive to. I just think it's like a constant news headline. Right.

And I think it'd be better for Democrats to go back to everybody debating Ukraine, the Russia-Ukraine conflict than the Israel-Gaza conflict. Or abortion. Yes. And then there'd be more space for other issues because Israel-Gaza is eating up a lot of oxygen. Yeah, but it's still not, as you mentioned, Jeffrey, it's still not at the top of voters' priority list. So, I mean, I take your point. I don't tend to think that

a ceasefire or some kind of resolution in the Middle East would be all that helpful for Biden. Sure, it would be a little bit helpful. But like, I think the broader point is that like really what he needs to do, and I don't know how he does it, but what he needs to do is he needs to consolidate his base because there are clearly a lot of people like non-white voters, I think in particular seem like, at least based on the New York Times Sienna poll, like seem like his biggest problem.

vulnerability. These are voters who obviously have voted Democratic in the past, which suggests that there is probably an easier way to win them over. And like just a little bit, yeah, like getting all those people who say they're going to vote for a Democratic Senate candidate to vote for Biden seems like a quote unquote easy way for him to improve. The issue is, yeah, I don't know how he does that. I don't know if those voters are kind of

actually mad at Biden or if they're just disengaged or, you know, and they're going to come back. Like, I am someone who tends to think that, like... Fundamentals matter. Right, exactly. Galen knows what I'm going to say because I've said it a million times on this podcast. We've been doing this long enough. It's the fundamentals, baby. Like, the campaigns can't, probably can't do all that much. Step aside, James Carville. It's no longer, it's the economy, stupid. It's Nathaniel Rakej's, it's the fundamentals, baby. And then Jeff's face actually after.

After Nathaniel said that was also fantastic. Because I was like, absolutely. I think Nathaniel and I are actually saying basically the same thing. I was trying to talk about something he could at all control. And that's the problem for him is that some of these other things are largely out of his hands in the kind of timeframe we're talking about.

Exactly. And like the campaign isn't like if they are listening to this campaign being like, what should we do, guys? What should we do? Five thirty eight politics podcast. Like, obviously, like they're screwed, but they're not doing that. Like they're going to do whatever they're going to do. They're going to have their outreach efforts to black voters, et cetera. And like, you know, they should do that because what else are they going to do? But I think at the end of the day, it's just going to be waiting around. Labor Day is going to pass. You know, people are going to tune more into the campaign and.

People are going to, you know, these disaffected Democrats are maybe going to look at Donald Trump and then they're going to decide, you

Do I want to hold my nose and vote for Biden to prevent this guy from coming back or not? And that's what it's going to be. It's going to be about the consolidation or not of the Democratic base come the fall. And that is just that is something that I just don't think I think is mostly out of Biden's control. Also, just even more broader, I think just the anti-Trump coalition, if you will. Exactly. Which is a lot of Democrats. But it's like that coalition that elected him. Can he piece it back together? Yeah.

Another question here is sort of emphasis, as you've all suggested, pivoting from talking a lot about infrastructure to maybe talking about abortion and also whether or not some of these ballot initiatives make the actual ballot in November. It's a question how much influence this would have. I do want to say that over the past two months, Arizona is one state in particular where abortion has come to the fore in a major way.

The referendum that would codify Roe into the state constitution appears to have gathered enough signatures to make the ballot. And then, of course, the state Supreme Court upheld a 19th century law banning essentially all abortion in the state, which the legislature later undid. According to our averages during that time, the polls in the state moved a grand total of half a point in Biden's direction.

Is this, Leah, would you say some suggestion of how salient the issue of abortion is? Or are people just not really paying attention to that yet? So looking at each individual state that the New York Times polled, I looked at the number one issue among voters. And obviously, top of the list in every state is the economy, 20 to 25 percent. It's almost like a

throwaway at this point. Like, yes, the economy is most important. And then for second place, it was generally it was either abortion or immigration. In Arizona, I think was actually tied where the second most important was 14 percent said abortion and 14 percent said immigration.

which is a little bit higher than in the other states, but barely like enough where maybe it's because of the states own the, how do I want to? It's the sub, it's like the thing that's at the top of the headlines. Because it's a big headline in Arizona or if it's just because, you know, it's like margin of error and it could be about the same in every state.

So I think if we're looking at that second issue, like among Republicans, immigration is the mobilizing issue, right? Like that is what Donald Trump has kind of emphasized and spoken about and brought to the forefront at the end of pretty much every election since he was first elected in 2016.

including the 2018 midterms. That's their mobilizing issue. And I think abortion probably has a similar role among Democrats, where for a portion of voters, it's going to be incredibly important. And that might be a part of the portion of voters that decides, you know, a slim margin in Arizona or Nevada or Wisconsin or whatever. So no, I wouldn't say that the polls suggest abortion.

abortion doesn't matter when you're looking at the responses to the most important issue. You're looking, yes, what is the number one most important issue, but you're also looking at what the other kind of issues in the mix are and which ones are the most powerful. So which ones are the most persuadable and which ones can you actually move voters on?

All right. Well, we are going to leave things there. I will also say in terms of X factors that we didn't mention, if you know a sort of narrative about replacing Biden bubbles back up to the fore, we will we will entertain that narrative at a future date on this podcast. I should also say that while we are recording about.

five miles away from me, less than five miles away from me. Michael Cohen is testifying in the Trump criminal trial. And in a recent ABC News poll, 80% of Trump supporters, if Trump was convicted, said they would continue to support him. But 16% said they would reconsider supporting him and 4% said they would no longer support him. Again,

We're never really going to know until the actual event happens how much it changes people's minds. But at a certain point, we will have some resolution in this trial. And that is one more X factor for us to consider. But let's move on and talk about those primaries in Maryland and West Virginia. But first, a break.

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Voters in Maryland, West Virginia, and Nebraska are heading to the polls on Tuesday. The most high profile of those races is the Democratic Senate primary in Maryland. So let's just...

start there. Maryland Senator Ben Cardin is retiring at the end of the year, and Prince George's County Executive Angela Alsobrooks and Representative David Trone, co-founder of Total Wine and More, are in a very competitive primary to replace him. Of course, whoever wins this primary will face former Governor Larry Hogan in the general. So,

I think that this might be the most competitive Senate primary of this entire cycle. Is that well, maybe left in the cycle. Ohio, Ohio got pretty competitive. There was there were some other races. Didn't end up being that competitive, though, although we don't know what happened in Maryland. But yeah, I think it's the most interesting. So what are the contours here?

Yeah. So you have David Trone, who is an older white guy. I think he's 68, who made many millions of dollars co-founding or running Total Wine and more.

Who is mostly self-funding his campaign. I believe at last count, as of May 6th, he had spent $62 million out of his own pocket on this campaign, which is if he advances to the general election and who knows what he might do here in the last few days. I don't know if there was another update since then. He might have the most self-funding anyone's ever had in a Senate race.

And his opponent is Angela Alsobrooks, who is the county executive in Prince George's County, which is the – it's the most populous majority black county in the country, just due east of Washington, D.C. And –

She's trailed Trone in the polls for most of the primary. She's not quite as well-known. She hasn't been able to spend nearly as much money, although she's fundraised, I would say, perfectly adequately for a Senate candidate. It's just that Trone has had so much of his own money available and has been running ads since last year this time, whereas also Brooks only got onto the airwaves in February, I believe, or March.

Yeah.

It seems like is Trone sort of running out of runway here right at the end and has also Brooks overtaken him. But it's a very close race. And if I didn't say it already, also Brooks is a black woman. And so, you know, she's actually noted like I would look very different from most people in the Senate, which is a not so subtle note on Trone being very much what is pretty typical in the Senate, an old white guy.

But the, the race aspect has also entered into what I think is kind of a backdrop of this primary, which is again, electability, uh, race and gender, I should say. So on the Republican side, Larry Hogan, uh, the very popular ex-governor is very likely to be the Republican nominee. And I think there is some debate about how competitive, whether this makes Maryland competitive in the general election. I believe our position here at five 38 speaking CF, everything we just said about split ticket voting, uh,

that it's not going to be competitive because bide's going to carry it by like 30 points and therefore the democratic sanity candidate probably will too but trone has basically been making the argument like

you guys need me because I'm more electable than also Brooks is I can beat Larry Hogan, which as Leah also alluded to some polls supposedly said, or at least indicated point and pointed people to, but you know, obviously that comes with, you know, like the question of, again, like, does it mean that a black woman is, is not electable, especially in a state like Maryland? Like probably not. Like, so it's, it's a really interesting race in that regard. Yeah. And I think that like, I mean,

That's an example of using polling to make a political argument, which, you know, that's a use of polling for politicians, not for analysts, because then we...

That's not what we're telling the whole story. But he has – David Schoen has emphasized that Washington Post poll that shows him beating or tying Larry Hogan in a general election. One thing that I did notice – and this is the fun part about living here and having a competitive Senate race, which never happens. So you actually get to watch TV and have like ads here.

So I was watching TV the other day and a negative ad against David Trone came on. And I was like, huh, I wonder who paid for that ad. Did also Brooks really go negative against David Trone? Guess who paid for the ad at the end? Women Vote. What is Women Vote? Emily's List. I was going to say Emily's List. Then the next ad is a negative ad against also Brooks.

And I'm waiting till the end. Who's paying for it? It's David Trone himself, his campaign. So now we kind of have the Calvary coming in for also Brooks, which I think could protect her from the concern about kind of Maryland politicians not wanting to go negative, you know, kind of wanting to be...

quote unquote. I think partially for that reason, because it has gone negative, the dynamic of the race has changed where you had Trone like clearly kind of having an advantage most of the cycle so far. And then in the last couple of weeks, it's like, seems like a really kind of like a toss up. All right.

All right. So we're going to get those results Tuesday night. We're running out of time here. But before we go, any races that you would like to call out from West Virginia or Nebraska? I see Leah raising her hand. What do you want to call out? Did you know that two members of the West Virginia congressional delegation have sons who are running for governor? Hmm. Hmm. I did not. Well, now you do. All right. Anything more you want to say about that race? No.

I mean, OK, so this is the Jim Justice open seat. He's running for Senate. So, you know, Jim Justice kind of has a pretty, you know, he's strongly favored in the Senate race, though he is facing a challenge from Alex Mooney. That leaves an open seat, though. Actually, Jim Justice, I think, was term limited. So it would have been an open seat anyway. And Shelley Moore Capito's son named Moore Capito.

is running. Carol Miller's son is running. The state treasurer is running. And Attorney General Patrick Morrissey is running, who, if you are a politics nerd, you remember him from the 2018 Senate race. There are only four members of the congressional delegation in West Virginia, right? Like the two senators and two House members. And two of them are mothers to governor's candidates. Right.

Any other races we want to shout out here before we wrap it up for the day.

Yeah, I'd say the third district in Maryland has turned into a very interesting open seat. It's a solidly blue seat that kind of runs between D.C. and Baltimore. And so the Democratic primary is where all the attention is. And you have Harry Dunn, who is a former Capitol Hill police officer who was there on January 6th defending the U.S. Capitol against insurrectionists.

And he had a massive fundraising call because he had this ad where he essentially walks through – or his campaign announcement. It's essentially walking through a recreation of the events of that day, talking about how he put like country over self and a number of other things. And so he raised a ton of money, I think nearly $4 million in the first quarter, which was more than any other non-incumbent who didn't self-fund raised. Yeah.

Do you want to close this out with anything, Nathaniel? Well, we're almost out of time, but I will note one thing that I'm keeping in the back of my mind is the primary challenge to Representative Carol Miller in West Virginia. She is facing someone who is also at the Capitol on January 6th on the other side, one of the people who entered the Capitol building and actually served jail time for his role doing that. He's perhaps making her sweat a little bit in that Republican primary. So I'll keep an eye on that on Tuesday.

All right, we're going to leave it there. And of course, folks can follow along Tuesday night on the FiveThirtyEight live blog. For now, thank you, Leah, Nathaniel, and Jeff.

Thanks, Galen. Thanks, Galen. Thank you. My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Chertavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts 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'll see you soon. Bye.