When We Could Know The Results In The House And Senate
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Wait, you're in a choir? I mean, I was when I was in Charlottesville. I haven't joined Warren Burlington yet. He's a good singer. Can you give me a Do? Can you give me a Re? Can you give me a Mi Fa So La Ti Do? Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. It is Thursday, November 10th, and we still do not have results in either the House or Senate that are full enough in order to project control of those two chambers. As we're going to discuss right now, I think we have some inkling about where things are

are headed. But nonetheless, it is now Thursday and we are in a similar position that we were in 2020, where it is time to wait as ballots get counted out West. Although I will say we at the very least have already had a projection in Pennsylvania.

In any case, I want to talk about what we know so far, what we're still waiting to find out, what some surprises were from the evening, and also just broad lessons that we can start to take away from election 2022. And here with me to discuss those lessons and surprises are senior elections analysts Nathaniel Rakich and Jeffrey Skelly. How's it going? It's good, Galen. Good to be with you in person. I know. This is such a treat.

grand total hours of sleep that you have gotten since Monday what are you thinking oh uh well I know I only got like three on election night I did better last night though all right I slept in a little bit this morning same same feeling yeah I also slept in got in a run this is feeling there are aspects of this that feel similar to 2020 there are aspects of it that don't because I'm

I can say the week of 2020, I got like three hours of sleep in total. Whereas like, you know, I'm feeling a little better this time around. So here is where things stand at the time of this recording. And of course, this is a situation that is in motion. So by the time you were listening to this, things could have changed.

Republicans are projected to win 211 House seats and Democrats are projected to win 201. Of course, a majority is 218 seats in total. There are many ballots still being counted and we may not get final results in the House until California counts all of its ballots. We will see. In the Senate, Georgia is headed to a runoff that was projected yesterday. Arizona, Nevada, and Alaska have yet to be projected. Alaska, we know that a Republican is going to win there, but the

question is whether it's going to be Lisa Murkowski or Kelly Chewbacca. And Democrats appear likely at this moment to keep Arizona. Nevada is maybe a little more up in the air, but let's actually just talk about that right now. And in case you are ready to give the, um,

Nathaniel and Jeffrey soft projection to any of the outstanding states. You know, I don't want to get you guys fired, but let's not use the P word. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Being projection. Right. Right. Okay. All right. So Arizona and Nevada, who wants to take which one?

Yeah, so I've been looking at Arizona. Jeffrey's been looking at Nevada. As you said, Galen, you know, I think that Mark Kelly, at least, is looking pretty good in Arizona. He does have a lead right now. I'm actually not sure exactly what it is at the moment. Maybe I think it was like five points last time I looked.

But yeah, you know, there are still, you know, thousands of votes left to be counted. I think it was 400,000 in Maricopa County alone, which is where Phoenix is. And most of the state lives in Maricopa County. So that's going to be pretty close. But, you know, Mark Kelly has a pretty decent lead. You know, those remaining ballots,

based on what happened in 2020 and also just kind of common sense based on what we know is out, it will probably actually be fairly good for Republicans, which usually isn't the case with these kind of late counted ballots in other states. But those ballots tend to be the ones that were kind of dropped off like at the last minute on election day. And those have skewed Republican and at least in 2020. But Kelly has a decent enough lead where I think he'll be able to withstand that.

Katie Hobbs, on the other hand, that's a very close race right now. I think it's less than a percentage point. It's 50-50 almost exactly the last time I checked, yeah. So my guess is that Carrie Lake will probably take the lead once some of those ballots are counted on Thursday night, Friday night. But that is...

also uncertain, but a split decision in Arizona wouldn't surprise me. It looks like we're actually getting a lot of split decisions. I know that because this race is so close, there weren't actually a ton of split ticket voters. This is more an indication of how truly close these two elections are than maybe that there's like

a broad part of the Arizona electorate that's voting for Mark Kelly and Kerry Lake. But that wasn't the case in other states. And, you know, I mean, maybe the prime example is New Hampshire. We saw a 25 point difference between the Republican governor and the Democratic senator winning reelection. But we will get to all of that later. What's going on in Nevada?

Well, obviously a lot of attention is on the Senate race. There you've got Adam Blacksalt, the Republican leading, Catherine Cortez Masto, the incumbent Democratic senator. But our understanding of what is left to vote is mostly mail ballots, which are going to skew Democratic. Democrats are more likely to vote by mail. And so my understanding is there's a bit over 100,000, might be 110, 120, even 130,000 votes left to

to tally. And if they are relatively Democratic-leaning, and a batch yesterday was basically like, I think it was like 65-35 or 62-35 or something like that in favor of Cortes-Masto.

If that continues, if trends continue, Cortez Masto will probably overtake Laxalt. But of course, we can't know for sure until you actually tally those ballots and you see if that trend does continue or if maybe some of the late mail ballots actually end up being less Democratic leaning because even some Republicans were dropping their mailing at the last second. In the governor's race...

Republican Joe Lombardo has a somewhat larger lead than Laxalt does in the Senate race. In this case, Lombardo is ahead of the incumbent Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak.

And so it is possible you could get a split decision there as well. Like Sisolak has, even if Sisolak is going to gain ground because of what we know about those outstanding ballots, it's he has more ground he needs to gain to actually win. So we, you know, it's possible Nevada also could offer a split decision. So why is it taking so long to get results in these two states?

It's just sort of the way their voting systems are set up. And remember, this is by statute. It's like the way the law works in the states. Like in Nevada, it's like as long as a mail ballot was postmarked on Election Day, it can be counted. So there might even be a few ballots that don't get delivered on Friday because Friday is Veterans Day. And so that's a federal holiday. So mail won't get delivered. So maybe there'll be even something coming on Saturday. But so it's those last few ballots.

uh, I guess coming in. So that, I mean, that's what's going on in Nevada. And I know Arizona is a, is a somewhat similar situation. Yeah. Arizona, you know, um, doesn't have a postmark deadline. It's a receipt deadline, but the bottom line is that both of these states, um,

vote primarily by mail or early. And Nevada sends a ballot to every voter, which is a new innovation since the pandemic. Arizona for a long time has been like a 60, 80% earlier absentee voting state. And those types of ballots just take longer to count because you have to take them out of the envelope. You have to kind of verify the voter signature and other information. And this is normal. At least Arizona has been taking this long for a long time. It's just that recently we started to kind of

actually care about the outcome because it's been election determining. Exactly. Exactly. It wasn't a swing state until recently. So this is giving me, like I said, some 2020 vibes, not just in that it's taking too long to figure out the result of the election, but also in that from what I'm hearing from you two and also from reading the internet, it seems like we know

We have a good sense of what the outcome is going to be, which is that Democrats are going to win control of the Senate and Republicans are going to win control of the House. But we kind of just have to wait and see what happens. And we can dig into more details of the House in a minute. But as far as the Senate is concerned, are you guys getting the sense right now that it's not even going to be up to the runoff in Georgia to determine control of the Senate, that Democrats may well have their 50 seats with Mark Kelly and Catherine Cortez Masto holding on?

I would say at this point that that is the most likely outcome, but I can't really put exactly like a rough probability on that. What? Only because there are a lot of – like for me, if things are trending the way they are in Nevada, like I do expect Cortez Masto to overtake Laxalt.

In Arizona, like I think Kelly is in a good position, except that there are still like a ton of ballots. And if they are especially Republican leaning, like maybe that lead shrinks a lot. And it's just you don't there's just enough wiggle room that I would feel uncomfortable like saying it's going to happen. Exactly. And the projections that come from the networks reflect, I think, 99.5 percent certainty. And we're certainly nowhere near that. What percent certainty would you put yourself at?

I'll be irresponsible and say I would give Democrats maybe 75% chance in the Senate right now. 75% chance in the Senate overall or 75% chance of winning control of the Senate with just Nevada and Arizona? Without Georgia, right? Without Georgia. Yeah. Okay. Okay. It's interesting because we have that tool that I've been playing around with for folks on YouTube throughout this election where you can call certain races and see how the forecast changes.

And where it stood yesterday with only what was called, it was a 60-40 proposition of Democrats winning control of the Senate. But if I gave Arizona to Mark Kelly, it went up to 75%. So you kind of just, you knew it intuitively, man. I guess so. I've spent too much time with the model, I guess. Do you want me to, can you guess what it said in the House when I plugged in the races that I was able to? 83%.

So that was one of the numbers that it spit out. You told me this yesterday, readers. Right, right, right, right. That was earlier on in the day. And I should stipulate here that our interactive tool known as Rita for folks who have been following along on YouTube doesn't give me the whole range of house seats to sort of plug in. It only gives me a few. But when I plugged in the ones that I was, which, and it's,

constricted to the closest races according to the polling averages going into election day according to the forecast.

And when I plugged in what I could, it was a 90-10 proposition for Republicans taking the House. Now, I should say there has been a lot of, a lot or a reasonable amount of national variation across the different regions. And so I think that we should maybe temper those expectations just a little bit because the forecast is making sort of national assumptions based off of those individual races. Yeah, I'll also point out that probably...

So there have been more upsets in favor of Democrats than in favor of Republicans. And so probably races like Colorado's 8th District, which surprisingly went for Democrats, wasn't on that interactive. So if you kind of give Democrats an extra, I don't think they got like four or five likely R seats, then I bet that Democrats' odds are probably higher than 10%. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, how are you guys thinking about where this nets out at this point? Not in terms of the odds per se. And like I said, maybe it was irresponsible for me to even mention that 90-10 number. I think our listeners know not to embrace uncertainty and to use their numbers responsibly. Right. Because I...

I should say our interactive is not as rigorous as like the broader forecast going into election day. Anyway, so apart from that 90-10 sort of proposition, what are you thinking in terms of net seats overall? Like where could we land in terms of a Republican or I guess even Democratic majority? So I did just a rough count on this earlier this morning and I was getting like 221-ish Republican seats overall.

And as a reminder, the House coming into this election was 222 Democratic seats and 213 Republican seats. So you're talking about like...

an eight to 10 seat gain for Republicans, which, you know, basically reversing the status quo, just flipping which party has what number essentially, which is definitely on the, I mean, if we're talking about this being like a pretty good midterm for Democrats, all things considered, that number would loom very large. You know, if Republicans only picked up 10 or so seats net,

I mean, that's definitely on the low end of what they were hoping for, certainly. We've seen the average over a number of decades is 26 pickups in the house for the party out of power. Yeah, I mean, again, though, there's like a lot of variation in that figure. I mean, you know, because you're looping in, you know,

Democrats and Republicans actually gaining a handful of seats in like 1998 and 2002, but then Democrats losing like 63 seats in 2010. So obviously it matters a lot about each individual one. But this would be this would certainly be on the like upper end of the president's party performance in a midterm in the House.

And I think an even better metric is looking at the raw number of seats rather than the gains, because in a sense, Republicans picked up a lot of the seats that they would have picked up in Biden's midterm in 2020 when they did surprisingly well in the House. But, you know, when they kind of arrive at, you know, let's say they win 221 seats and

You look back at some of the red waves in 2010 and 2014, and Republicans were in the 240s. You look back at some of the blue waves in 2006 and 2018, and Democrats were in the 230s. So I think that clearly shows that this, well, we don't know the results yet, but it looks like it's not going to be a red wave. Okay. When are we going to know the results?

Well, California tells you a while also because it is possible – it is possible Republicans do a little bit better than that because what if California ends up being a state that sort of joins the Florida and New York party and is like a state where they perform somewhat better than they did elsewhere because there are a lot of important close seats in there. There's a couple in like Southern California where Democrats were slightly favored but –

If Republicans have a good night, maybe they pick those up. And so maybe they even can get into like 225 overall or something. But that the fact that that's sort of like the high end is also indicative of it not being a red wave. OK, so we're going to have to wait for California to know the results in the House.

For the Senate, I know we've sort of winked at the fact that we know what the outcome might be. But when do you think that 99.5% certainty will set in for the folks actually projecting this from the decision desk? I mean, hopefully it might be this weekend. I don't know. I mean, once we get more of the ballots counted from Nevada...

And there's, I mean, it might be this weekend or something. I don't know. It could even be in early next week, depending on how Arizona is going, because it has more left to deal with. I texted my editor, Chad, the morning of election day to tell him that if we didn't have results by Thursday, I would quit. So I guess that means we're done, guys. I'm out of here. Have a good weekend. Bye.

All right. I guess I'm going to have to take that back. I want to talk about, you mentioned upsets, Nathaniel, and I want to talk a little bit about the surprises from the evening.

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You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad. Reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lipson Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a reproduced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Lipson Ads. Go to LipsonAds.com now. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N-Ads.com. All right. I think we can stipulate here that if you have been following along with us throughout this election cycle,

The sort of broad contours of where things are ending up are not so far off from what the polling indicated all along, which was an extremely tight race for the Senate. And that looks like what we're getting. I think the House may be a little bit more surprising, but.

But at the end of the day, the generic ballot polling average going into the night was, you know, one or two points. There was some disagreement between the generic ballot average that our forecast used and the generic ballot average that we showed publicly. Well, it's different. They're measuring different things. The forecast is different from the polling average.

The forecast is, well, the generic ballot average that the forecast uses converts everything into likely voters, whereas the generic ballot average that folks see on the website is just everything that pollsters give us. And it also accounts for uncontested seats, which Democrats left a lot of seats uncontested, which means that they didn't obviously get votes there. Which, do you have a sense at this point of where the House popular vote may end up?

Well, I saw – gosh, I wish I could credit who it was. Someone was talking about it being sort of R plus 6 at one point on Wednesday or something, Wednesday night. But that was going to definitely narrow because of California's votes not being accounted for. My rough guess is like R plus 2-ish.

Maybe I mean, our plus two to our plus four is basically what our indicators were showing us going into this. Anyway, it's not time to litigate whether or not we were right. We already had Nate on the podcast Tuesday night to say that we were. But more importantly, where did we see surprises?

So I think that the biggest surprises just going by the model were, as you mentioned, kind of in the House. There were five districts that we had rated as likely Republican, which means that the Republican had between a 75 and 95 percent chance of winning that actually went for Democrats. So the biggest upset wasn't, as I mentioned earlier, Colorado's eighth district where Democrat Yadira Caraveo ended up winning despite having, I think, only a 9 percent chance.

But then Democrats also surprisingly won in Ohio's 1st and 13th districts, which I think could be credited to the coattails of Tim Ryan running a fairly strong Senate campaign. Obviously, he lost, but it seems like maybe it paid off down ballot. You also had a Democratic upset in New Mexico's 2nd district. And then in North Carolina's 13th district was kind of the last one where we thought that Republicans were favored, but Democrats won.

Would you consider the near Republican sweep in New York to be a surprise? Yeah, I think so. Oh, yeah. Like on the flip side of this, it's like New York, I think at this point, Republicans have picked up four. I think we have four projections and seats that were the Democrats were favored in our forecast, a couple in the Hudson Valley, a couple in Long Island into like outskirts of New York City. So, you know, that's the flip side is there were some surprising results for Republicans in New York and

I guess in a way they cancel each other out, but it's still interesting to see this. Yeah, and I think that a lot of that can also be credited similarly to Lee Zeldin running a strong gubernatorial campaign. That ended up quite close. I think five points was the last margin that I saw, and our forecast was not buying into that, but I think-

credit goes to the pollsters who saw that coming. I think that the final margin may be a bit more than that because New York City had a fair number of votes left and obviously they'll be pretty democratic leaning. But the point is that Zeldin

ran the strongest Republican statewide campaign in New York in some time. So that would be, that was clearly good for Republicans across the state. Oh, I mean, so one of the surprises I think that we can talk about is just the regional variation. I think if you listen to a lot of political analysis, it's like the nationalization of politics, the nationalization of politics, the nationalization of politics. We did see real differences across the country based on maybe what issues were emphasized most, what kinds of candidates were running in different states. You know,

One surprise, I think, is that Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan will end up running significantly ahead of how Democrat Kathy Hochul did in New York. And the idea that Michigan is simply not more Democratic than New York, but it is just maybe like an indication of issue salience, the difference in Michigan versus New York.

New York. Also, you know, candidate quality. Republicans didn't really put up a strong candidate for, I mean... Well, they had a couple get disqualified in the primary. They really went through the ringer before they settled on Tudor Dixon, who I think, I don't think you would say that that was like a poor quality candidate for the Republicans writ large. Certainly not to the extent... Writ large. Yeah, writ large is an important caveat there because she was...

Whitmer vastly outspent her. Yeah. Vast. Like the ad, the ad like numbers were something like 90% of like the ad points would be were for Whitmer ads and like 10% for Dixon. So like,

She was not the strongest candidate at the Republicans. Okay. But like no Herschel Walker. I mean, we weren't reporting, you know, like scandals about Tudor Dixon. She wasn't actively bad, but she, yeah, she didn't seem to run much of a campaign. She didn't have previous experience running for or winning elected office, which of course is a variable that our model takes into account. So yeah, they could have done better for sure. Okay. So we talked about a surprise being regional variation. What do you, I, you know, I have my own theories. What do you all chalk that up to?

Well, you know, actually, it's interesting that we say it is a surprise. I actually would love to go back and take a closer look at that because I know with the nationalization of our politics, which is a real thing, even regardless of what just happened, is in the grand scheme of things, we've been moving toward greater nationalization. But Nate, I know, has talked about at times with...

In presidential elections and with the presidential race in particular, you can see a ton of correlation from results. Whereas in a midterm, there may be somewhat less correlation, even though it's still correlated. Like obviously if there's a wave for one party, like-

You're going to see that. It's just that I do wonder if midterms do allow for a little more of that variation. Well, because you have a different candidate running in every district and state as opposed to one candidate running all across the country. Which, speaking of presidential candidacies, we haven't mentioned Florida yet, which is

It's no surprise that Marco Rubio and Ron DeSantis won re-election, but the margins I think might be surprising. So our polling average going into election day showed DeSantis leading by 12 points. It looks like he's going to end up beating Charlie Crisp by nearly 20 points in the state. Marco Rubio also outperformed his polling average. So not a surprise in terms of the winner, but a surprise in terms of what we actually care most about at 538, which is the margin. What's up?

It's like the red wave hit there, I guess. It's not clear to me yet. I know Florida has an older population. We've talked about like, you know, has it been drifting toward being more of a red state than a purple state? I don't know if this clinches it or something, but it does make me wonder if we need to sort of adjust our worldview to view Florida as – maybe it's not Ohio, but it has – it might be closer to Ohio now than it is to, I don't know, California.

you know, Arizona or something. I mean, I think it is Ohio. I mean, I think we've known since, you know, at least 2018 that it was, you know, redder than the nation as a whole by a little bit. I think some people react and say Florida's a red state now. It's done. I think the difference between it and Ohio, which are both, you know, kind of light red, you know, relative to the nation as a whole, but Ohio, I think it

it makes sense given Republicans gains in the Midwest and things like that. Florida, I think, is a state where Democrats could still win given how urban it is, given how diverse it is, that if they kind of adopt a different strategy and just frankly, the state party gets its act together. Well, I mean, the thing that's interesting about Florida is that it does sort of challenge Democrats raison d'etre to a large degree, which is it's a highly urbanized state that is highly diverse.

Like, you know, it's kind of it's kind of and it's an also a big state with a large with large population centers. So it's interesting that Democrats are getting creamed there. You know, it is possible that one of the things that's been going on is in like 2008, 12, 16, and particularly 2016. Think about the presidential race in those states. It's like Cuban-Americans were drifting toward the Democrats. And I kind of wonder that in 2020, we saw them shift sort of back. And I kind of wonder if like

That has returned to like maybe where it once was and at the same time like other shifts within the state, maybe even other – I mean Hispanics are not a monolith. Like we have a lot of variety. It's like different groups at the same time that that was happening like may have been shifting to the right while they were shifting left and like this all kind of evened out in certain ways and like Florida was highly competitive.

But then you get into a situation where maybe all the groups have been moving to the right. And so that's sort of shifted our notion of it. Because it's important to say that while the Latino electorate is not a monolith, we have seen broad movement towards the right amongst Latino voters, even if we have seen significantly more movement in South Florida and the Rio Grande Valley. So what about the issues here? So we're talking about some result variation. We saw, like we mentioned,

poor results for Democrats in New York and Florida, particularly good results for Democrats in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania. Um, are there any other states or districts we want to call out where one party overperformed or underperformed? Yeah, I would mention Colorado, um, given the results in the eighth district. And then I think what could end up being the biggest surprise of the night, um,

Lauren Boebert might lose in Colorado's third district. That's an extremely close race right now. It looks like it's going to come down to a recount. But for the Democrat to even come close in this district, which is R plus 15, which, you know, it's a ostensibly a, you know, pro-Republican midterm year. It's really kind of baffling. Almost. I mean, not baffling, except that Boebert, except Boebert, it's just an extremely flawed candidate. And maybe it just came home to roost. Are you telling me that candidate quality matters? Yeah.

Yeah, but I wouldn't have said it would matter this much. Yeah, it's pretty dramatic. Our model for reference gave Adam Frisch, the Democratic candidate, only a 3% chance of winning. So that would be one of the biggest upsets, I think, in the history of our model, probably. Wow. All right. So we're going to have to keep track of that. Okay, so those are some of the variations that we're seeing. Like,

Candidate quality is one of them. We talked about it the night of the election with Nate. What about issues? Yeah. So you mentioned Michigan, which I think has to be kind of the brightest spot for Democrats in this election night. And I think clearly abortion was a difference maker there. You had this ballot measure to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution, which passed. You saw in the exit polls, which normally we don't put a lot of credence into these, but there was just like...

I think 45% of Michigan voters said that abortion was their most kind of important issue going in, which was just very different outside the margin of error from like the national number, which I think it was in like the 20s and inflation was more important nationally. So I think clearly that was a difference maker there. It seemed to have maybe driven Democratic victories down the ballot as well. You saw Democrats take control of both the state Senate and the state house in Michigan. Wait, for the first time since like the 80s?

The state Senate has been Republican since 1984, I believe. So that's obviously an historic win. That was also helped out by new legislative maps that were drawn by Michigan's independent commissions. Those maps were no longer gerrymandered. But yeah, I think really, I guess I would say a blue wave localized to Michigan.

Yeah. I mean, what about the other issues that we were talking about were throughout the cycle were inflation and the economy crime? Is it clear that maybe that had regional effects in New York or Florida? I mean, so I know inflation affected the nation differently depending on where you live. The Sunbelt had some of the highest inflation numbers, whereas sort of the upper Midwest, the Northeast didn't experience the kind of inflation that places like

I mean, Florida in particular, but also like the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Phoenix, Southern California, Atlanta, for example. So could we see that differential or could we see a differential in terms of like crime?

I mean, it's possible. I know crime got a lot of attention in the New York governor's race. Hochul, I think she had some statements about crime that Republicans really seized on to attack her with. She's out of touch with the concerns of voters. I do wonder with New York, especially in the New York City metro area, where much of the state's population lives, very high cost of living. So even if inflation wasn't as bad

comparatively speaking, it may have been felt in a way that was very high there. And if you look, you know, you think about some of the results in those Long Island seats. Even in this, if you look, I mean, we can get into like really localized data like two weeks from now if we want to or next week or what have you. But like there was kind of a red wave in the city. Like in parts of Brooklyn, you see like the Asian population in New York City, which is sizable and growing. And we saw swing to the right in the mayoral race, swung to the right again in this race.

Yeah, I mean, that could be down to larger trends that we'd already seen pop up. I know one of the classic things in Brooklyn, right, is that there's a very large Jewish population and it has been trending Republican for a while and is now maybe even like firmly there. So it's possible that there are even further gains in that part that are reflected there.

Maybe not in the House races, but if you're thinking about statewide elections. And I also – I think – isn't there one in Rockland County too that's like a big – yeah, like these are just parts of the story. Yeah.

One more thing I want to get to, and maybe we don't have enough data yet to say whether or not this is to categorize this as a surprise one way or another. We talked about candidate quality. We talked about issues. We talked about regional variation. What about turnout? Can we say much about whether this was a high turnout election? Because going into it, looking at the enthusiasm polling, it looked like both parties were enthusiastic to vote in this election. Did that materialize in a high turnout election?

I haven't tried to run numbers on this yet, but I will say that Michael McDonald from the United States Election Project, he's a professor, he runs this, which has a lot of the turnout baseline data for the voting eligible population. It's extremely helpful and useful. He put the turnout...

Just kind of an estimate based on what he was seeing at maybe like 47% of the voting eligible population, which would be very high historically for a midterm. It's not quite 2018 when basically it was 50%, but that still would be one of the highest midterm turnouts ever, basically. So like, or at least in remotely modern times.

Because 2018 had the highest turnout since before women could vote nationally. So that was the sort of craziest circle comparisons we're making. So it's like not quite 2018, but close. And so that would represent very high midterm turnout. And was there any suggestion that there was a sort of differential? I mean, I have to think not if it was such a close election, but I don't want to make assumptions like folks could have turned out and crossed party lines.

I mean, I would say that it's more likely that there still was some differential turnout, but that maybe, like, if you're thinking about, I don't know, the Pennsylvania Senate race and some of these other contests, some of the...

One of the important things that happens in a midterm election is that some voters switch. You know, maybe they voted for basically it's like people switching votes actually is really important. Like if they voted for, say, Biden in 2020, but then they vote for Republican in 2022, like in 2018 for two. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the net net shift there's two. And we know from 2018 that one of the important factors was some Trump voters actually voted for Democrats in the midterms.

And it's my thought is maybe looking at some of these Senate races, did that just not happen as much as maybe we've seen in some previous midterms? Again, we're a little we try to be careful with the exit poll numbers. But I do know that like a pretty sizable percentage of people who somewhat disapproved of Biden voted Democrats in the House race.

And what is again, the polls back that up. Yeah, I mean, exactly. And so, you know, a lot of times historically, there's definitely a relationship between like presidential approval and how well or poorly, usually poorly the president's party does. Whereas Biden's definitely sticks out as like he's in like the low to mid 40s, depending if you're looking at voters or all adults and Democrats.

Yet Democrats didn't lose that much ground in the House. And maybe that is partly down to people who somewhat disapproved of Biden sticking with Democrats in the House vote because they didn't like what the Republicans were offering. Yeah, no, it's notable when you look at those charts that show the years that the in party, the party in control of the White House actually sort of gained seats or held steady at the midterms. The president's approval is usually in the 60s. So significantly higher than Biden's votes, which like

on our average right now shows his approval rating at 42%. So really notable. I mean, I think we can make distinctions here, which is in this election, there have been surprises that the polling suggested would be the case going in. But our surprises, nonetheless, when you look at the historical context, so it's not like, oh, my goodness, like this was such a big error. We're so surprised.

It's that the data going in was somewhat surprising because it ran counter to the fundamentals. And we had this question all along, you know, are the results going to skew closer to the numbers that we're looking at? Or are they going to skew closer to the fundamentals and the historical expectations? I think the answer is it skewed closer to the numbers, which in itself is a surprise. How about did I did I sort of like put that fairly?

Yeah. I mean, you know, I mean, I don't think it's surprising that the polls and the numbers were generally correct. Right, right, right. I don't mean to say that.

Yeah, you know, certainly going by the fundamentals, going by historical precedent, you know, this even if Republicans take control of the House or the Senate, you know, you'd still have to call it a Republican victory, but also like a disappointment. Like it was clearly a missed opportunity for them. I think the day that the 2020 election was called, Nathaniel, you tweeted out congratulations to the Republican performance in the 2022 midterms. Yeah.

So, you know, subscribing a little bit to that historical president. How are you feeling about that tweet now? Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it you know, I think I certainly stand by it at the time, you know, given the the historical midterm trends. But yeah, I mean, Democrats definitely did better than expected. I think a lot of that is because of the Dobbs decision and the issue of abortion. You know, it could still be, you know, I mean, you know, again, if Republicans win the Senate and the House, which is still within the realm of possibility, you'd still have to

say it was better for them than it was for Democrats. But yeah, it was not the... So a surprise. So you agree with me. It was a surprise. Yes, sure. But yeah, it wasn't the night that Republicans or I would have envisioned in late 2020 or 2021.

All right. So we're going to start to wrap up here. And I had a conversation with our colleague Alex Samuels about what the Georgia runoff could look like. And so we're going to hear some of that. Before I do, just broad lessons. So we've mentioned a lot of them here already. But is there anything else that you took away from this election that we haven't mentioned yet?

I have one. I have one prompt if you can't think of anything. But if you can think of something, let me know, Jeff. I think our tired minds would appreciate a prompt. It's a sexy prompt. Ooh, okay. Lay it on a scale. Even better. That didn't give it away. 2024. Oh, here we go. So...

Look, I think narratives oftentimes get set well early, but also when there are surprises of sort or people overperform expectations. And the two people I can think of who overperformed against expectations were Ron DeSantis and Gretchen Whitmer. What did this midterm mean for both of them? And it could mean different things for each.

Well, I'll take DeSantis because I think it's easier in the sense that I think the expectation is he's going to run for president. Most of the things he has been doing would suggest he wants to run for president. And I think when you are already polling – basically, DeSantis is much better known –

already than I think historically people in his position would be sort of heading into a presidential cycle. He's already the name at the top of people's lists of like potential alternatives to Donald Trump.

So even if Trump does declare he's going to run soon or whenever he does, I think there is some expectation that DeSantis will run. And I think he would be crazy not to be like, do you see what I did in Florida? Like Florida was a swing state, but now it's a red state. And that's because of me. I mean, he can take the credit. When you're in that position, you take the blame or you take the credit and he gets to take the credit for it. So I think he would be making that as a – using that as evidence of,

I can win the presidential election nationally. I can lead a Republican charge in 2024 and that I'm a stronger bet than a guy who has overseen – who has never won the popular vote, oversaw bad losses in the House in 2018 and lost in reelection in 2020. Like I feel like that's a real obvious thing to do. And even if he's getting called desanctimonious by Donald Trump, I think that he would have plenty of ammunition to use.

Did you see the cover of the New York Post this morning? No, I didn't. But I read. I'll show it to you right now. It read Trump D. Dumpty. Don, who couldn't build a wall, had a great fall. Can all the GOP's men put the party back together again? That's from Rupert Murdoch. Well, not from Rupert Murdoch himself, but from his publication. His universe. Yes. Trump D. Dumpty. The the the the the sort of nickname tides have turned.

I mean, to me, it's like there is an opportunity here for Republicans who want to go in a different direction from Trump, even if it is like parts of sort of make America great again sort of perspectives on things. But.

rephrasing, reframing, shifting in a way that tries to broaden its appeal to some extent, broaden the party's appeal. Someone not named Trump would help them do that because I'll tell you, one of the things that's going to... Maybe overturning Roe v. Wade helped unify Democrats and encouraged them to turn out in this midterm. It's like, if Donald Trump's a Republican nominee...

I can tell you, Democrats, even if they have like a really ugly – if Biden doesn't run again and they have like a really ugly primary fight and someone was – if Trump is the Republican nominee, that's a real force for unification on the Democratic side. So obviously we can talk about Whitmer and like what might happen on that side of the aisle. But like to me, it's like you should be looking for a new face if you want to improve your chances of winning in 2024. Yeah.

Yeah. And I mean, I guess I'll talk about Whitmer. I mean, she won reelection. Obviously, that is the most important thing. If she had lost, you know, I think that's...

that would have been it for her, at least presidentially. Yeah, I mean, she, I think, would be a strong candidate for Democrats in 2024 as well. She's won a swing state twice. But the issue is, of course, will Biden run? If he runs, I don't see her running. I don't think Biden will get seriously challenged. But yeah, she set herself up well. I will say,

the pressure is going to be on her a little bit. It's maybe not, it wasn't actually, I mean, we didn't really think she was going to lose probably. So I'm not sure the pressure was really on in the election. I think the pressure is on now governing for the next two years because she has a trifecta now. What can she get done in some very narrow majorities in the Michigan legislature? You know, with great power comes great responsibility. And if she kind of screws that up, well, I read a lot of comic books. What can I say? The, you know, if she kind of screws that up,

the, you know, that could, you know, maybe her approval rating dips because she overextended herself or something like that. That could be determinative. And I will say that if Biden doesn't run, there are going to be many governors, I mean, senators too, but I feel like Democrats may have a kind of a strong bench of governors right now who would be angling. We know Gavin Newsom's already like looking at it. I mean, it's pretty clear from his actions he's thinking about it. So like,

I don't know if like Jared Polis, who just won a very impressive victory in Colorado, might might think about it like there's there are names. Other governors will be looking at this, too, and it could be very wide open. So I if Biden chooses not to run again, which is the it's the most likely situation for an incumbent president to choose not to run for to not to seek reelection.

maybe ever, or at least in modern times. So like it is a distinct possibility. I don't know what he's going to do, but it is a distinct possibility. Do you think the results of this election made a difference in terms of whether he's going to run again or not?

No, you're saying no. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a personal decision for him because I think the pros and cons are pretty clear. The pro is you get to be president and politicians, ambitious politicians want to be president. And the cons are, you know, he's old. And, you know, I think those are the only two variables basically that are going to go into his decision. Yeah, as my old boss used to say, he...

Once you have like Potomac fever or White House fever, you don't lose it to your six feet under. So if Biden has gotten he's reached the promised land, he's president United States, he's gotten the thing he always wanted to be.

And that might be hard to let go even if he is older and there are concerns about his age. That may not stop him in the end but it also might because he also has talked about being a bridge for the party and how much he genuinely meant that and how much he personally meant that remains to be seen.

The betting odds right now, Nathaniel, you can see. But Jeff, do you want to guess where they put Biden's chances of winning the Democratic nomination in 2024? I'm going to say like 45. That's like pretty good. It's 39%. Okay. That's too low. I agree that that is probably too low. I would put it more like...

If he runs, I would say it's slightly more likely than not that he runs. And if he does run, he will be the Democratic nominee in most cases. Okay. Now I just pulled up the betting odds for Republican presidential nominee in 2024. I'm excited for when this is no longer relevant. Tell me odds for both Trump and DeSantis. I think...

They're both at 40. You think they're both at 40? You think it's even? Yeah. Okay. Can I say, I'm going to say Trump like 52, DeSantis like 39, right?

Okay, guys, this is interesting. And of course, I will caveat this, that this is just the Scottish teens betting on a website. These are not formal odds. And in fact, if you have been following along this cycle so far, the betting markets got this election really wrong. But this is what it is right now. Ron DeSantis, 41% chance of winning the Republican nomination. Donald Trump, 35% chance. So betting markets have turned...

fast and fiercely in Ron DeSantis' direction. Is that like a recent shift, like just after the results? Did they swing notably or has it been a little bit steady on that front? Like I'm just curious if there's a trend on that. Yes, they crossed lines on November 8th itself. Okay, well, as DeSantis was cruising to re-election, there was, yeah, it's an overreaction, so.

We've covered a lot of ground. Someone might be able to make some money. Buy low on Trump. Not us. Don't bet on elections, kids. We do not bet on elections. That would be bad. Can't do that. But if you want to bet on Trump, that might be a reasonable bet.

Reasonable move with those odds. And for the record, on November 7th, Biden had a 31% chance of winning the Democratic nomination, according to PredictIt, and now it is at 40%. So yeah, the Scottish teams really took this year's election to heart.

With that, is there anything else you want to say before I let you go back from whence you came, which is Washington, D.C. and Vermont? Yeah, I would say that this is just an opportunity for me to repeat the important knowledge that midterm elections are not predictive of presidential elections. I was literally going to say that. Good thing to end on. Good thing to end on. Yeah. No correlation. Zero correlation. Basically, this result...

does not mean that Democrats are going to win in 2024, just as in 2010 when Democrats got, you know, there was Republicans' huge red wave. That did not mean that Barack Obama couldn't win re-election in 2012. I think there's a tendency sometimes to just make assumptions about that kind of thing, but they have basically no correlation whatsoever. All right. There you go. Important to keep in mind. I'm going to leave it there. Thank you, Jeffrey and Nathaniel. Thanks, Jack.

I was going to say thanks, Jeffrey. But thanks, Jeffrey. And thanks, Gail. Thanks, Gail. Thanks, Nathaniel. My pleasure. My pleasure, as always. Before we go, I had a brief conversation with our colleague Alex Samuels yesterday on Wednesday after Georgia was projected to go to a runoff. She has been looking into the race there and what historical precedents look like for a runoff, but how things might be different this year. So here's a little bit of our conversation.

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Hey Alex, how's it going? Good, happy to be back. Happy to be back. Are you really happy to be back or is someone paying you to say that? No, no, it's two o'clock. We got four or five hours of sleep. I'm good. We're all good. You got four or five hours of sleep? You got more than me. Okay, so...

Georgia has been projected exciting, but maybe a little less exciting that the race is not over, at least as far as we're concerned. So what's going on? Why is that going to a runoff when the governor's race was a clear victory for Brian Kemp?

So in the Georgia Senate race, what made this contest a little more complicated was the presence of a third party candidate on the ballot. So Libertarian Chase Oliver essentially prevented Democrat Senator Raphael Warnock or Republican Hershel Walker from reaching the 50 percent threshold needed to win outright elections.

Plus, this race was always just going to be more competitive, to be frank. I think our forecast had the Senate race has a dead heat. But in the governor's race, Kemp had a clear edge and he was able to oust Stacey Abrams quite easily yesterday. Alex, are you saying that the polls were right?

I might be. Am I saying our forecast is right? We'd love to hear it. We'd love to hear it. Okay, so this means that Georgians are going to go to vote in the runoff election on December 6th. In fact, or

Early voting begins next week. So it's on the 14th. So don't get too comfortable. They're never done. Yeah. The voting is state in the country. It might be. So what should we expect, though, from that runoff? Because I think there are different theories of the case in terms of how Democrats and Republicans perform in runoff elections.

Historically, Republicans do better in Georgia runoff races. But in 2021, of course, we saw the opposite of that. Warnock did win his race, as did fellow Georgia Senator John Ossoff, in part because former President Donald Trump discouraged his voters from trusting Georgia's electoral process. But then on top of that, we saw a really concerted effort among Democrats to get their voters out to the polls. And that really helped both Democrats win their respective races. I think

I think, you know, whether we see some of the same trends this year will depend on whether Georgia determines the outlook of the Senate as it did last year. Which is to say, if it's a sort of 49-50 proposition going in and it would give the majority seat to either Democrats or Republicans, you think we could see a repeat of 2021, which is to say that you think Democrats could have the edge? Mm.

Oh, that's hard to say. I don't know if Democrats. I'm trying to pin you down, Alex. Come on. It'll be a forecasting website. It'll be it'll be hard because, you know, Herschel Walker comes in with like a lot of warts as a candidate. And we didn't necessarily see those same scandals that we did in 2021. So I think if it does come down to that, forty nine fifty in Georgia again determines which party controls the Senate. We're going to see.

A ton of money going into this race, you know, expect every surrogate from out of the woodwork to come out to the Peach State. But...

you know, based on what happened in 2021, I want to say that Warnock might have an edge. But our forecast, our final forecast actually said that if this race were to go to a runoff, then Walker would have the edge 69% of the time. I know it's almost like we have sort of, like I said, competing theories of the case, because on the one hand, like you said, historically, we expect Republicans to do better in runoffs in Georgia, because those runoff electorates tend to be a bit older, a bit

whiter. And historically, that's been a coalition that favors Republicans. Yes. However, in this case, you know, Herschel Walker, would you say that Herschel Walker wouldn't have even gotten to where he is without Kemp also being on the ballot and like turning out Republicans to help him? Yeah. And that was something I thought I was like, you know, is it possible that

Walker just rides on Kemp's coattails and wins outright. And without Kemp on the ballot, is it possible that Walker suffers? Like, I don't know. I think that's something that's like to be determined. I think historically, you know, our forecast and history favors Republicans. But based on what we saw in 2021, I think it's really anyone's game. It is going to be a runoff, but it might not determine the majority. We will have to see what ultimately happens with Catherine Cortez Masto and Adam Waxall in Pennsylvania.

Nevada, maybe we'll get a projection today. One could hope. Cross your fingers with me, Alex. Either way, you can stick with us over on the FiveThirtyEight website, FiveThirtyEight.com, where we're going to be live blogging until we get some sort of conclusion to all of this. But in the meantime, thank you so much, Alex, for joining me. Yes, thank you for having me.

And with that, my name is Galen Druk. Sophia Leibowitz, Emily Vanesky, Kevin Ryder, and Tony Chow are in the control room, and Chadwick Matlin is our editorial director. 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. Also, remember that you can watch these podcasts on YouTube.

We've all been in person this whole week, so it's especially fun. I think maybe, I don't know. It's fun for me. I don't know if it's fun for the viewer, but we're all together and can, you know, sort of jibe off each other. Anyway, thank you for listening, and we will see you soon.