The Takeaways From 2023's Super Tuesday
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Or is that earlier? I feel like by seventh grade you smell bad if you go to school unshowered. Maybe that's more like a fifth grade move. I was going to, I don't know. I feel like seventh grade girl is not going to do that.

Yeah, when do people start to smell bad? Like sixth grade? I think it's like sixth grade. Ugh. Yeah. Ugh. You'll find out soon enough, Amelia. Twins! Stinky twins. Well, there's like... Do you think soon enough? Eventually. In not that many years. Girls don't smell as bad as boys, right? Sure, let's go with that.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. Tuesday was quite the day in American politics. Former President Donald Trump was arraigned in Manhattan, pleading not guilty to 34 charges of falsifying business records in the first degree.

The general outline of the case against Trump appears to be what was expected. While falsifying business documents is a misdemeanor in New York State, it was elevated to a felony charge because, prosecutors will argue, it was in service of another crime. But for folks attentively waiting to find out exactly what that other crime was, it's time to wait some more. The documents made public on Tuesday didn't fully clarify which crime or crimes prosecutors will pursue.

The coverage was wall-to-wall, from takeoff at Palm Beach Airport on Monday, to walking into the New York County Criminal Court building Tuesday afternoon, to takeoff from LaGuardia a few hours later. And Trump capped things off with a speech from Mar-a-Lago during which he painted himself as the victim of not just the New York case, but various other, potentially more serious cases against him.

And if that wasn't enough, Tuesday was also election day in one of the country's purplest states and its third largest city. In Wisconsin, voters chose the liberal state Supreme Court candidate, Janet Protasewicz, by a double-digit margin, flipping the ideological orientation of the court. And in Chicago, voters chose progressive Brandon Johnson in a very close race, ultimately rejecting the tough-on-crime alternative.

Here with me to talk about it all, our senior reporter, Amelia Thompson-DeVoe. Hey, Amelia, how's it going? Good morning. Good. Yeah, I'm on the West Coast, so it's really early. And also here with us is senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich. Hey, Nathaniel, how's it going? Good morning, Galen. I did not wake up as early as Amelia this morning, but it feels like I did because it was an election night and always got to stay up late on election night. Yeah, I'm usually have like fried nerves at the end of a day like this, but

My nerves were so fried, honestly, after yesterday that I just like passed out entirely. I usually have to like drink some sleepy time tea and like maybe a glass of wine, but I truly just got knocked out. So I'm actually feeling like well rested this morning, surprisingly. Weird. Maybe that only makes one of us. That's great. Okay. It was all that, all those man on the street interviews you were doing. Oh, yeah. Everyone, Galen interviewed the naked cowboy.

Along with lots of other folks who were downtown across the street from the New York County Criminal Court. It was an interesting scene. We can talk about it a little as we get into it. But the more important thing is what was going on inside the courthouse, of course. Amelia, we previewed the expected legal theory in this case on the podcast before. Were there any surprises there?

By and large, the structure of what we saw in the charges were not that surprising. One question I did have was how they were going to get to the number of counts that were being reported. It was being reported that there was somewhere between

two dozen and 30 counts, and it ended up being 34 counts. And the way that they did that was by basically having a count for each individual business record that was falsified. So obviously, we knew the underlying issue, misconduct here was that Michael Cohen paid Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress who claims that she had an affair with Trump, Trump denies it,

We've all been talking about this for years. Michael Cohen paid her off and then Trump paid him back. And the way that Trump did this

was by essentially creating a fake retainer so that it looked like he had hired Michael Cohen for legal services, and then Michael Cohen submitted invoices to him for legal services, and he was paid back over the course of a year. Now, of course, that was just a reimbursement, and Michael Cohen was not actually providing any legal services. This is all of what the indictment alleges, and I think there's actually not...

a lot of contestation of these facts. So, you know, it's pretty straightforward. Presumably the prosecutors have records of this, but each of those checks and then also false records in business ledgers and in business records are all counted as individual counts.

So that answered one question I had, how they were going to get to that high number. Right. It was basically, from what I understand, three charges per payment, and there were 11 payments. And then the 34th charge is just because one charge was accidentally entered a second time into the ledger, is what I understand from reading about this yesterday. Yeah.

Yeah. So it's like, it's pretty, it's all pretty technical, which, you know, is, is normal for an indictment. They're usually not like your beach read. And so that, that was all pretty straightforward and did answer some questions, but overall it didn't, it wasn't surprising to see all of that laid out. We did get a little more information in the statement of facts that the prosecutors submitted alongside the indictment, which the indictment was just kind of like a

a dry list of the charges, basically almost identical language over and over again. A statement of facts is more of the story of what happened according to the prosecutors.

And in that, they're clearly trying to lay out the argument that Trump and his associates were engaged in a long-running scheme that involved falsification of business records to try to hide stories that would be bad for Trump as he was running for president.

in 2015 and 2016. So there are a couple of examples of payoffs that were made to other people who had information about Trump that he did not want to get out there, even though one of the stories ended up not being true.

And Trump says the other one isn't true, but that one hasn't been investigated and proven to not be true, which is what it said in the indictment. And those are in the statement of facts as a way of bolstering this idea that Trump and Michael Cohen and David Pecker, who's the head of American politics,

which owned the National Enquirer at the time, were all working together to try to suppress stories that would be bad for Trump and that they were persistently falsifying business records throughout.

Right. Now, the question that we really have leading up to this is falsifying business records is a misdemeanor. So what crime was this all in service of? And in the statement of facts, they didn't list any statutes. We don't know exactly what the crimes are. I think we can guess from what you mentioned that part of it is going to be this theory that it was

some kind of campaign donation and that it broke a secondary law, either a New York state law or a federal law regarding limits on campaign donations. There was one other theory about sort of tax fraud, which again, the statues weren't listed, but sort of it referenced it and we can sort of guess at it. What was that? Because we haven't discussed that yet on the podcast.

Yeah. So this was a question that I also had going into this, whether if the prosecutors were going to put forward this theory that the business records were falsified in order to commit some kind of election-related crime, are they also going to offer another legal theory that would allow this case to persist at the felony level if those election-related charges get thrown out? Because we talked about this on the podcast before, right?

It's not clear what election-related statutes they're going to pursue. During the news conference that he gave after the indictment, Alvin Bragg talked both about a New York state law that makes it illegal to conspire to interfere with an election. And then, of course, he also mentioned the federal cap on campaign contributions that was violated by this payment. And

There are potential legal problems with both of those avenues. It's not clear why New York state law would apply in a federal election. Maybe it would, but, you know, they're going to have to make that argument. And then it's also not clear why Alvin Bragg, who is a New York prosecutor, has jurisdiction over a federal crime. So both of those are a little bit dicey. And I had wondered whether they would offer another theory that would basically be the backstop.

And that would prevent this from getting kicked down to a misdemeanor if the judge throws out the election-related connection. And basically what they're alleging is that this was tax fraud because of the way Michael Cohen was paid back. So because they didn't want this to look like a reimbursement, they essentially paid Michael Cohen double so that he could claim this as income on his taxes and

And it would look like income and he wouldn't lose the money because, you know, if he gets reimbursed $130,000 and then he ends up having to pay back 50% of it in taxes, he's not really getting reimbursed. So they're presenting this as potential tax fraud. It's still a little bit unclear how they're going to make this argument. The weird thing about it, though, is that it's not really fraud because they were overpaying the state tax.

So they weren't cheating the state out of money. They ended up paying the state money that the state wasn't owed because it was a reimbursement and not income. So...

I think they were pretty careful to not call it fraud. They were talking about making false statements to tax authorities. So it's basically saying that you lied to the taxman, but not that you defrauded the taxman because you actually paid them more than they were owed. So, you know, I think it's smart of the prosecutors. You know, these are very accomplished, smart people, right?

smart of them to introduce another theory. It is also one that is a little bit weird, but I think is more straightforward and potentially less likely to get thrown out by a judge who doesn't buy the other theory. Yeah. So it sounds like this case still does certainly have the risk of being kicked down to a misdemeanor, given all that we learned yesterday. It does.

And Trump's lawyers will absolutely try to do that. So what will happen next is, you know, there's already been talk about when a trial would be in negotiations about whether a trial would be earlier in 2024 or later in 2024. But what Trump's lawyers are going to do first is basically try to attack every aspect of this case.

They'll go through a process called discovery where they'll get access to more of the information that the prosecutors have in building up the case against Trump. So they'll have more of a window and we will have more of a window eventually into what exactly they are pursuing in terms of a legal theory.

And then Trump's lawyers are just going to go after every aspect of this. And they're going to try to get it thrown out before it even goes to trial. Yeah. Nathaniel, I know it hasn't even been a day since these charges were unsealed. But we've been continuing to track how Americans are responding to the indictment of Donald Trump and polls have been out in the field throughout. So have we been able to glean any more information about what Americans think about all of this?

Yeah, so as you mentioned, we don't have, obviously, any polls since, you know, the arraignment yesterday. But I'm not really sure that matters since we, like,

We learned a little bit, right? We, you know, we kind of got confirmation of what we thought in terms of what the actual charges would be. And then we got a bit more insight into the kind of underlying crime part of it, but like we're still not certain. Right. So I'm not too worried about, you know, people dramatically changing their opinions based on what happened on Tuesday, but we have had a couple of, of other polls that kind of took place over the weekend that, that have been released that we haven't mentioned on the podcast yet. And, and basically they continue to show what, um,

what the other polls have shown. So, for example, there was a YouGov economist poll and that showed that Americans largely agree with the indictment of Trump. So 50% agreed with the grand jury decision and 36% disagreed with it. That's kind of similar to the polls we saw before. It's similar to kind of how public opinion on Trump breaks down.

but then in the republican primary we've also had another pollster reuters ipsos confirm what we saw from yougov yahoo news which was that trump seems to be widening his lead in the uh in the republican primary so in

Ipsos Reuters' latest poll, it's Trump 48%, DeSantis 19%. And in their previous poll, which was in mid-March, so two or three weeks ago, it was Trump 44%, DeSantis 30%. So actually, mostly that's been DeSantis lowering his support and people kind of parking on undecided.

So maybe that doesn't have to do as much with the indictment as we know as I think Jeffrey mentioned on the podcast on Monday You know Trump has been rising in the polls generally over the last few weeks and months So it's it's hard to tease that out exactly but but yeah, no real surprises In in public opinion since we last talked. Yeah, and you know as we mentioned I was downtown yesterday outside the courthouse and

Obviously, anyone who's spending their Tuesday afternoon outside of a Manhattan courthouse is not representative of the average American voter. But, you know, the park across the street was divided basically evenly in two between anti-Trump protesters and pro-Trump protesters who had obviously very different messages. But

Speaking on the anti-Trump side, you still heard a lot of folks say, yeah, like, I do think this is politically motivated. It's all political. And this is something that we saw in the polling where a plurality of Americans said they thought it was politically motivated indictment, even if they did think he should be indicted. I also heard, you know, folks who are basically there to support the charges say that they don't expect Donald Trump to end up in prison as a result of this case. And...

Which is fair. Yeah. Because even though these are felonies, these are not the kinds of felonies that usually land people in jail. So that's an important thing to bear in mind. Even though all of the charges, I think, carry up to four years in jail, the judge has discretion with sentencing and these are still...

low-level charges. So Trump could be convicted and still not go to prison. Yeah. And I should say the other thing I heard was that folks who were there, you know, supporting these charges once again said, like, we don't think this is the most important case against Trump. So kind of, you know, folks who were outside the court were reflecting a lot of, you know, what we saw in public opinion on the Trump side, you

Of course, people were there to support Trump, but also were just wanted to register lots of different grievances. So there were folks talking about

issues, about Joe Biden in general, about, you know, to some extent QAnon. Again, this is like not a very representative sample of the American public. And if you want, I mean, I'm sure folks saw on TV what it all looked like. If you walked honestly just one block away from this park, there were people just walking to and from offices. I think a lot of the people around the perimeter of the park itself were people on lunch breaks downtown who just wanted to see the

What all was happening? It was an interesting mix between the, you know, pro and anti-Trump protesters, the media, the police, and people who were on lunch breaks. So quite the... Were the protesters, Galen, were they like, were they all New Yorkers? Like, had anyone come from any significant distance? So...

Marjorie Taylor Greene, of course. Setting aside politicians like the normies, anyone come from a significant distance. Well, the other politician who was down there, George Santos, is somewhat representative of the folks that I talked to on the Trump side who were from Long Island. Okay. So talked to a few people who were there to support Trump from Long Island. Talked to the naked cowboy who...

Honestly, I didn't ask him where he lives. I guess that's a bias on my part. I don't necessarily know that he lives in New York City, although I would assume that he, yeah. In my mind, he just lives in Times Square underneath those like stairs. But who actually knows? Of course, he was there supporting Trump, although, you know, in many ways wasn't even really focused on the indictment at all.

The folks on the anti-Trump side were from New York, the ones that I talked to. But final question here before we move on to the elections is what's the timeline for these other possible indictments of Trump? Do we have any idea? I mean, we can guess. We've been guessing on the Georgia one for months when it has literally, I think we've been saying on the podcast for months that it could come any time and it's still not here. Yeah.

So that one, I think, is just whenever Fulton County prosecutors decide they want to actually move forward with that case and start releasing charges.

And then it seems like the federal investigations are still active. So there are still fights over testimony. There are still subpoenas going out. So it doesn't seem like that one, those two, and this is here we're talking about the two federal investigations of Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his role in January 6th.

And then his alleged mishandling of classified documents after he left the presidency. Both of those seem like they are active right now, but I would expect that there would be a lot of pressure on the special counsel, Jack Smith, to wrap those up before the 2024 Republican primary starts going in earnest.

Because the Department of Justice is going to want to avoid a perception that they are putting a thumb on the scale in the primary. So what I've been seeing is maybe some kind of resolution by the summer. I would say early summer is probably a little bit optimistic given how fast investigations tend to go and how wide ranging these appear to be.

But I do think, you know, in the next six months, probably we'll have a better sense of what's going on with those just because we will be getting closer and closer to when people are actually casting ballots. And the Department of Justice and the federal government, law enforcement in general, are very wary of appearing to influence the outcome of elections. All right. Well, let's talk about some of those high profile Midwestern elections yesterday. Okay.

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As we mentioned earlier this week on the podcast, we didn't have much polling to set expectations in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election. But with more than 95% of the expected votes tallied, Protasiewicz leads Kelly by 11 points. Nathaniel, you know, it's a weird question to ask given that we didn't have a polling average in this case. But is that a better showing than you would have expected?

Yes. I, you know, I was expecting produce a wits to win. Um, it wasn't quite sure how favored she was. The one poll we had showed her two points ahead, but it was an internal poll from a pro Kelly group. Um, so you would assume that, uh, her produce a wits as a lead was, was a little wider than that. Um, how much wider we don't know. Well, now we do know, I guess. Um, but, uh, um,

But you also had the advertising and financial disparity, which greatly favored Protusewitz and the liberal side. So, you know, yeah, like I guess I wasn't quite sure what to expect. But just in general, like Wisconsin is a swing state. Like you guys know this. Everybody knows this. And like for one side to win by 11 points, even in a ostensibly nonpartisan election, is basically a landslide.

Um, so yeah, it was, uh, I think, you know, anything greater than the double digits in Wisconsin, you have to be like, that was an impressive performance. Yeah. I've, I saw several different avenues of analysis emerging from this race. You know, one of them, probably the most obvious one is abortion is still a salient issue for voters and, you know, first trimester abortion bans are not popular in purple states.

I don't think that that is a surprise to anyone. The other piece of analysis I saw, though, was looking at, you know, one of the last state Supreme Court races in Wisconsin in April 2020, where Dan Kelly lost in that case to Jill Karofsky by the exact same margin that Janet Portisiewicz appears to be winning by right now.

What's going on there? I mean, like April 2020, you think about it, it's a wildly different political context. We're in the first two months of COVID. The Dobbs decision hasn't come down, so Roe hasn't been overturned yet. What should we make of those two data points? So that 2020 race coincided with the Democratic primary election.

which was competitive and the Republican primary wasn't. So I think you had a turnout environment that was heavily weighted toward Democrats in that case. So I think that had a, a lot to do with it. Um, but I also think that Dan Kelly himself, um, is, is part of the problem, right? He has made a number of controversial, um,

kind of right-wing statements. He's compared affirmative action to slavery. He's made, you know, like very anti-abortion comments. And so he was not a very strong candidate for the conservative side during the primary. They, you know, primary voters rejected a more moderate candidate, Jennifer Dorough, and chose Kelly. And I think that that

was a obviously in retrospect a bad decision for them but so yeah i think in in general like you look at that wisconsin race and it really is a continuation of the two patterns that we saw in the 2022 midterms which was abortion energizes democrats to vote and candidate quality bites republicans in the ass

Yeah. And especially abortion matters to the kinds of people who, the kinds of Democrats who are likely to vote in a state Supreme Court election in an off year. So these are people who are really tuned in to the news and to politics, who are engaged, engaged.

who know enough about the system to come out and vote in this election. And those are also people who are among the likeliest to be motivated by abortion as an issue. So to me,

This signals that at least for the core groups of Democrats that were motivated by abortion in 2022, they continue to be motivated at least in states where abortion rights are threatened. You know, there's been this question of whether people are

as motivated if they live in a state like California, where, you know, obviously, unless something changes at the federal level, abortion is safe and protected. And, you know, even so, it's protected now under the state constitution. So it's very different than a state like Wisconsin, where it has been virtually impossible to get an abortion since last summer, because a 19th century ban is in place that bans almost all abortions. And so

Abortion providers just shut down immediately after Dobbs. And that's the reality that people have been living in for the past nine months. And so I think what we're seeing is that when people are living, when Democrats are living in those circumstances, they are motivated by abortion and they continue to be motivated.

It will be interesting to see what happens, you know, for example, if Republicans manage to ban abortion after six weeks in Florida or, you

North Carolina Republicans seem to have just gotten a super majority in that state, which is a Democrat announced that she's flipping. I think that announcement is going to be today, right, Nathaniel? Yeah. Yeah. And so that's really big news because North Carolina is one of these states that's been a huge hub for abortion patients from all over the South. I mean, wait times for an abortion in North Carolina are weeks and weeks and

And the clinics are absorbing lots of people. And so if abortion became more restricted in North Carolina, which like, let me say it's already pretty restricted. There's a 72 hour waiting period, which is really significant burden to put on patients.

But if it's further restricted, either with a first trimester ban or a six week ban or even a full ban, that I think could have huge political implications based on what we saw in 2022 and also what we saw last night. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned North Carolina, Amelia, because, you know, I don't want to go too far afield. But, you know, when we talk about, you know, these elections, right, we're interested in the consequences. And I assume, Galen, that we'll talk

about the consequences of the Wisconsin race imminently, but also, you know, a party switch like this one in North Carolina has huge policy implications as well. And I definitely want to make sure that we mention that now that this state representative has flipped the

from Democrat to Republican in North Carolina. Republicans have veto-proof majorities in both chambers of the state legislature, so they've effectively taken control of North Carolina state government, and that means that a lot of conservative priorities are going to be able to move now, assuming that Republicans hold together, and that includes abortion, includes anti-protester bills, it includes questions of LGBT rights, immigration, etc.

Yeah. I mean, North Carolina had already been passing. I mean, they've been they've been loosening their gun laws fairly significantly. So this was already going to be a pretty conservative legislative session. But now I think things are much wider open. Yeah. I mean, so things in Wisconsin don't change overnight in the way that they would if this was a legislative election. Cases have to make their way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court and the justices still have to, you know, adjudicate them.

So what is the expectation there? Basically, that now that Janet Protasewicz will be on the court, this 19th century Wisconsin abortion ban will be overturned or ruled inactionable by the attorney general. And then the other main focus has been redistricting. So like, is there even a case that's making its way to the Supreme Court in Wisconsin now? Or is that something that could be years in the making?

There is no redistricting case right now, but groups have promised to bring one against both the congressional and legislative maps. And yeah, Galen, as you mentioned, you know, it's interesting because, you know, we're not that far away from the 2024 election, certainly from the primaries. And so I think there is a question about whether there's time to get the map thrown out and draw a new map in time to be active for 2024. But I think certainly the long term prospects for Wisconsin's

current maps don't look great. And that could be worth one or two extra congressional districts for Democrats, given that currently Wisconsin's congressional delegation is 6-2 Republican, but obviously it's a swing state and there's a way to draw an extra Democratic seat or two.

Um, and, and then in the state legislature where Republicans have dominated for a long time, in large part due to the state's, um, geography, because, you know, you kind of increasingly have a situation where Democrats are concentrated in the Milwaukee and Madison areas, and then the rest of the state is Republican. Um, and that does give Republicans an advantage, but, um, but at the same time, the, the map is, um, you know, I think more friendly to Republicans than it, than any, um, kind of

party blind map would be. And so, for example, the supermajority that Republicans held on to in the state Senate last night in a special election, I would imagine that that would be at risk. You know, it would be interesting. It'll be interesting to see what a quote unquote fair map in Wisconsin, as this court defines it, looks like in terms of whether Democrats are actually competitive to flip one of these chambers at some point. I think that would still be, you know, they would still be underdogs for that, but it's at least kind of on the table in a way that it really hasn't been in the last decade.

The other important, potentially important downstream consequence, of course, as we're talking about 2024, is that, you know, liberals will be in control of the court when inevitably they get questions about election administration that could matter in 2024. Might not. But, you know, these cases do come before the court and they have already they already ruled that ballot boxes or ballot box.

Ballot drop boxes were not allowed last summer. And they also put restrictions on other people dropping off absentee ballots for you. So, you know...

These are significant decisions that govern the way elections happen. And so having control of the court flip will matter for that as well, although in ways we can't predict now. Yeah. And when it comes to Wisconsin's political future, Amelia, you mentioned that these highly politically engaged Democratic voters appear to be turning out.

That's also a segment of the electorate that is more likely to have a college degree. I think we saw in the, you know, the classic wow counties, Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington counties last night, the Democrats did quite well, which is the suburban area around Milwaukee. I'm curious though, you know, so we saw, uh,

This election last night, which is an indication that, you know, abortion may still be high on voters' minds. In 2022, we still saw, you know, a split decision in which both incumbents, the Democratic governor and the Republican senator, Ron Johnson, won.

And so like in a general election environment like 2024, should we still sort of keep lessons from this kind of an election? Or is it that the turnout is just so much higher in those elections that a lot more people are going to be voting for whom something like abortion may not be as salient, that the economy may be more important or whatever it may be like? Should people be thinking, oh, Wisconsin's heading in a blue direction?

I mean, abortion might be legal in Wisconsin by the 2024 election. I think that's actually quite likely. So, you know, abortion as a motivating issue might not be there for some voters. They might be like, great, we're back to the pre-Dobb status quo. Yeah.

I'm not freaked out about this anymore. So, you know, that's a possibility. That is a really good point. So we will keep that in mind as all of these laws continue to change around the country. Let's talk about Chicago before we go. We had more polling there. And as we mentioned, Paul Vallis was the favorite, although polls did show a tight race nonetheless. In the end, Brandon Johnson pulled it out. To what should we ascribe his success, Nathaniel?

Yeah, that was a bit of a surprise. You know, all of the polls you had a kind of it reminded me actually of the 2018 Florida governor's race deep cut for some of our listeners there, which was a race where Andrew Gillum, the Democrat, led in like 20 polls in a row, but they were all by like two points. And of course, as everybody knows, Ron DeSantis ended up winning that race. Yeah.

And so it doesn't take – kind of the number of polls gives you kind of a false sense of security, right? That like, oh, Vallis led by three, Vallis led by four, Vallis led by one. But in fact, all of those polls are within the margin of error. And if there is this kind of unexpected surge in support for Brandon Johnson, whether it was among progressive voters turning out or he had a very good turnout operation in –

you know among black voters or something like that that makes a difference and that is what happened he ended up winning by three points uh over valis and yeah i mean i don't know it's harder to say i think what um what happened there um it just looks like johnson kind of was doing a little bit better than than people expected he made some inroads into some latino areas for example which as we mentioned on monday or some of the was kind of maybe the like swing region where a lot of

People voted for Chuy Garcia in the first round and who endorsed Johnson, but also like Latinos don't like immediately kind of, you don't think immediately that they're part of the progressive base. So there was some question about where they would go.

And yeah, and Johnson did get strong turnout from kind of his base areas. So I'm not sure there's much to it other than it was a very close election between a lot of important blocs in Chicago. So you have progressives versus more moderate slash conservatives. You had in large part white voters versus black voters.

with kind of Latinos and also Asians, I should mention, being kind of swing voters in that race. And it ended up being very close. It was the closest Chicago mayoral race in, I think, at least 40 years. And it just kind of happened to go one way over the other.

I think the thing that was most interesting about the result is that we knew going into this from some polling that had been done that people were really concerned about crime across the board. And we had two candidates who were presenting very different visions of how to deal with crime in Chicago. We had Vallis, who was presenting a very traditional, tough-on-crime, police union-endorsed vision of

And then we had Johnson, who was trying to back away from being tied fully to the defund the police movement, but was making a pitch for thinking about crime in a different way, for investing in not just police and not just law enforcement and sort of trying to deal with crime when it happened, but trying to go back and deal with some of the root causes of crime and invest in parts of the city that needed investment and invest in social services. And so...

To me, I do think it's interesting that when this was an issue that clearly people on both sides cared about –

Johnson's vision is the one that won. And I don't know how much to take away from that because we have a couple other examples from New York and Los Angeles where mayoral races recently also revolved around the issue of crime. And at least in Los Angeles, we saw a similar thing happen where the more conservative, traditionally tough on crime candidate didn't win. Of course, that's not what happened in New York.

But I do think it's an interesting signal that even though this idea of defund the police seems to be a fairly effective attack mechanism on Democrats overall, it seems like a lot of voters in cities are

ready to rethink the way that crime has been handled in the past. And they're not necessarily jumping at the opportunity to go back to a traditional tough on crime model. Of course, we're talking about the biggest cities in the country. We're talking about left-leaning electorates. This is not Americans overall. But it is interesting to see that that, especially after all of the

focus on crime in the pandemic and the wake of the pandemic, that that's where voters are in 2023. Yeah. I mean, I think there's one other trend that we can pull out from the New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago mayoral elections, which is that all three of them featured a race between a Black and a white candidate. And in all three, the Black candidate won. And

And of course, in New York, Eric Adams is the moderate candidate. But in Los Angeles, Karen Bass was the more progressive candidate. And in Chicago, Brandon Johnson was the more progressive candidate. I mean, I think it shows a couple of things.

One, like a 50-50 election in Chicago more or less means that I'm sure folks are still worried about crime and Paul Dallas had his appeals. But I think progressives have sort of been struggling for a while to figure out how do we actually like win these elections in these blue districts? What do we have to do to win? I think one of them is really appeal to voters of color to whom like the beginning of the Bernie Sanders like 2016 campaign didn't really appeal much.

And I think the other thing is for moderates, too, I wonder if, for example, a moderate black candidate was running in Chicago, if that candidate would have won. Because if Paul Vallis is getting basically 50 percent of the vote without much support amongst black voters in Chicago, I think you can imagine a world in which a moderate sort of more tough on crime Eric Adams type of candidate can do just fine in Chicago.

I do think there's also an argument that Vallis was not the strongest candidate that, you know, moderates could have hoped for. I mean, there were these attacks against him that just kind of kept sticking, that he wasn't really a Democrat. He also, I mean, just from when I lived in Chicago, I remember I was very surprised that he was suddenly surging a couple months ago in the election at all because he just had always been one of these also-ran kind of guys. Yeah.

And so, you know, I mean, that happens in Chicago mayoral elections can be surprising. The 2019 election, it was a total surprise that Lori Lightfoot ended up winning. But yeah, but I do think that Paul Vallis may also just not have been the candidate that people wanted. And even though education was not the top issue for people in polls, I do think the contrast between someone like Vallis, who is very much associated with the charter school movement,

versus someone like Johnson, who's a former teacher, aligned with the teachers' union, may have been appealing after Lightfoot was supported by some progressives and then immediately went in and got into a huge, tense standoff that resulted in a teacher strike with the teachers' union. And a lot of people were, you know, like, immediately like, ooh, like, this is how she's going to do things? Okay. And so I think...

In a city that's so segregated, where education is such a big issue and where there was a history of Rahm Emanuel, the previous mayor before Lightfoot,

Being very into charter schools and sort of, you know, being accused of kind of focusing on more affluent areas of the city and letting education slide in poorer areas of the city that are disproportionately where people of color live. I think Johnson's credentials on education may have helped him as well. Yeah, I think that's exactly right, Amelia, about education.

uh Vallis not being the strongest candidate you know as I mentioned you did have this very Stark contrast where and Vallis was did he had made comments back in 2009 that he was like more of a Republican than a Democrat um and I think if you had had someone with a who wasn't quite as it didn't make as Stark of an ideological contrast with Johnson who was did have better kind of

moderate Democrat credentials, like solidly within the party, but still moderate, maybe that that person could have won. And Ballas himself, as you mentioned, does not have a great track record. He lost the 2002 gubernatorial primary in Illinois to none other than Rod Blagojevich.

He finished in single digits in the last mayoral race. So I think it may have been that he was kind of in the right place at the right time in the first round here and was able to have a strong plurality of support in the first round, but just is maybe not a strong enough candidate to build up to a majority, especially in a city that I think voted for Joe Biden by like 80%, just like having that majority.

kind of you know kind of closet republican accusation floating around about him was was maybe a bridge too far all right well any um comments to wrap up today's show after what was a long and tiring day in american politics on tuesday maybe next time you indict a former president don't arraign him on the biggest election day of the year that is my plea to funny

You should send her a list of days that are unacceptable. That work for me? Yeah. Yeah, that work for you. You can send it to Jack Smith, too. We'll get you some nice decorative stamps so your mail stands out. All right. Well, we're going to leave it there. Thank you, Nathaniel and Amelia. Thank you, Galen. Thanks, Galen.

My name is Galen Druk. Tony Chow is in the control room and also on video 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 tell someone about us. Thanks for listening and we will see you soon.