Your Post-Election Questions, Answered
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I literally wasn't allowed to watch TV and I still didn't read those. Reading is different. Reading is wholesome. No, no, no. I know. I'm saying like, it's not like I was spending my time watching TV. So I don't know what I was doing, but whatever. You just stood and stared at the wall, practicing your, you know, talking to yourself. And that's why you became a podcast host. Talking, talking to my, hello, hello. And welcome to the 538 Politics podcast.

I'm Galen Druk. I'm Galen Druk. I'm Galen Druk. I'm Galen Druk. I'm Galen Druk.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. It's been exactly one month since the election, and during that time, many of you have been sending us your questions about narratives, polling, theories for Harris's loss or Trump's win, and your thoughts on the news in general. First of all, I want to say thank you for getting in touch. We love hearing from you. And today, we're going to open up that mailbag and try to answer some of those questions.

I also want to say up front that by news cycle standards, the election day is well in the rearview mirror. But by data standards, we're still figuring some stuff out. Our best read on the electorate will come next year from voter verified surveys after the states publish all available data on who voted.

But we do still have lots of data, at least a lot more than we did a month ago. And so we're going to do our best to answer your questions. And we've assembled our best to do just that. So here with me today is senior researcher Mary Radcliffe. Welcome to the podcast, Mary. Good afternoon, Galen.

It's good to see you. Also here with us is Senior Elections Analyst Nathaniel Rakich. Welcome to the podcast, Nathaniel. Hey, Galen. And also here with us is Senior Elections Analyst Jeffrey Skelly. Welcome. Hey there, Galen. All right. So I actually want to eventually ask you all what questions you still have about the 2024 election. So just get ready for that. But I want to kick things off with Brett, who just dives right into some specific trends that we saw in the 2024 election. Brett asks...

I know there are logical explanations, but please cover further on the FiveThirtyEight pod how Trump carried North Carolina by three points, but Democrats grand slammed down-ballot state-level races. Include a psychology expert in the discussion. Thank you. Mary, would you like to be our psychology expert? Well, I don't think I can lay any claim to that sort of title. But I mean, I think North Carolina is not really unique in this respect, right? I mean, we had...

a lot of the swing states that voted for Trump at the top of the ticket vote for Democrats for statewide races down ballot. You can see this especially in the Senate races. And North Carolina has a proud tradition of ticket splitting. If you look at the last several presidential elections in North Carolina, Republicans won at the presidential level and Democrats won the gubernatorial races. I think really the ultimate explanation here is

These state level races, these state specific races have their own contours and their own nuances. Right. There is a deeply flawed Republican candidate for governor, for example. So I think, you know, this is the kind of thing we saw across the country, ticket splitting between the presidential and the state level races. And North Carolina has been doing this for years. Yeah. And I'm also not sure I would agree with Brett's premise. Right.

Yeah.

Republicans also won the state auditor race, the insurance commissioner race, the labor commissioner race, agriculture commissioner. So, yeah, it was, you know, basically in a 50-50 state. That's basically what you would expect, right? Jeffrey, I know you've done some research into ticket splitting historically and also in 2024 specifically. And we've been in a period of decline for ticket splitting, but it looks like there wasn't actually further decline in 2024. Ticket splitting held steady or maybe even ticked up a little bit?

Yeah, at least my initial analysis of U.S. Senate results suggested that ticket splitting was roughly similar to what it was in 2020. Now, that might surprise some people because we had more split ticket outcomes for Senate. But you were talking about a number of states that were very close. And it just so happened this time around that a few of those states went one direction for Senate and the other direction for Senate.

And also, as my analysis of that showed, a lot of that was not necessarily a bunch of voters necessarily splitting their tickets, but some voters opting to not vote in the Senate race or vote for a third party candidate in the Senate race. For example, that was suggested there were some Trump voters, for instance, who did not necessarily vote.

in some of those down ballot races. It's not necessarily a ton of voters, but it was enough to potentially matter. And that the only Democrat who won in a split ticket scenario, who seems to have really won at least a reasonably sizable number of Trump voters was Ruben Gallego in Arizona. And then you can maybe talk about how Carrie Lake was possibly the worst Senate candidate in recent history, or I don't know. I'm just saying she's really building a resume for bad candidate. And so between 2022 and 2024, she's

She's really moved to the top of the list on that front. And so she should run again and earn perennial candidate status. And then we can really test her out. Just just the lows that she can get to. But third time's the charm, Jeffrey. Yeah. I mean, well, that is true. I mean, maybe she will win next time. You know, she'll she'll she'll complete the full Beto O'Rourke and run for president in twenty twenty eight.

I mean, listen, she's got to run for reelection for governor in 2026 anyways. Right. Oh, right. She's never acknowledged what she lost. OK, continuing on, Amy asks, I was just wondering if you can talk about Democratic voter drop off in this election. Most of the attention has been paid to Trump gaining, but he really didn't gain that much in number of votes. It was the number of Democrats outnumbered.

not voting compared to 2020 that really seemed to be the driving force of his win. Would love to hear a discussion focused on that. I think we might take issue with the premise of this question, but let's still have that discussion. So Jeffrey, why don't you kick us off?

Yeah. So, you know, right now we don't have final certified results like we do for 2020, of course. But it looks like right now that Kamala Harris won something around 6.6, 6.7 million fewer votes than Joe Biden did in 2020. And Donald Trump looks to have won a little less than three million more than he did four years ago. So, you know, in that sense, that super top line number, I think you could make a case about that.

The problem is, of course, if you kind of dig down at the state level, you get a more complicated story. And I think in the sense that Donald Trump made clear gains in his relative number of votes in especially –

A lot of the swing states, the swing states are the main place where you saw turnout actually go up in terms of just raw votes from from four years ago. A number of states had smaller vote totals, particularly places like California and New York actually had much lower vote totals. But that to me is actually important. Part of the story is that Democrats seem to have lost the most ground in some places where they had the most ground to lose.

But at the same time, if you look in a state where turnout went up and it was a swing state like a Wisconsin, Harris actually gained votes on Biden. But Trump just gained more on himself. And you see this actually pop up in a lot of the swing states where Harris either lost slightly fewer than Biden.

I should say one slightly fewer than Biden or one slightly more than Biden, but Trump won notably more than he did four years ago. So to me, that tells a more complicated story about some people moving into Trump's camp, some people who may have not voted in 2020 turning out and voting for Trump.

And yes, to some extent, there is some evidence that there were some Democrats who didn't show up. But it seems to me that they were concentrated, especially in states where Democrats had a big lead. And also where there wasn't active campaigning necessarily in the run up to the election to activate, you know, partisans to turn out, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. I mean, like right now in California, it's like Harris has got like nine point two million and Biden has had eleven point one million. But Trump has like

10,000, 11,000, 12,000 or so more votes than he did in 2020 there right now. Now, California hasn't completed things, but they're getting pretty close. And so I think that just points to just

drop in turnout. But that's a huge chunk of the six point six million that that Harris has lost nationally. Right. It's from California. Right. And I think the premise of this question might in part be, hey, Democrats need to do more to appeal to people they already have in their camp. And this is an argument that you might hear from progressives, which is the answer is more progressive policies. You

You can debate that on its own merits. But in the places where there was active campaigning, it is not the case that Democrats just didn't turn out.

Yeah. And with respect to progressive policies, I mean, talking about California, you see huge drop offs for Democrats like in Southern California, around L.A. County. I mean, these are places where you do see progressive policies in place. So I'm not sure that that prescription is going to really address the issues the Democrats have with turnout. Yeah, I think I agree with all that. I do think that Democrats do have a an enthusiasm. I think they have both a turnout and persuasion problem with voters of color in particular. I think you look at

those counties the thoughts of non-white voters and those saw Bayer drop offs and turnout and that's something we've seen in past like Senate races and stuff for example and was a bit of a warning sign for people like Mandela Barnes for example but I think I generally don't recommend thinking about things in terms of like oh there is this pool of voters

all like voters who are going to turn out in presidential elections. And you're kind of like siphoning away from it, like all the people who voted in 2020, that's your universe. And then it's just like people dropped off and, you know, on, you know, the Democratic side, for instance, that is I just don't think that's not how elections work, to Jeffrey's point. And also like that it ignores that a 2020 was an extremely high turnout environment that we were not likely to hit again because of the

The enthusiasm around that election was very high. Also, a lot of states made it a lot easier to vote because of the pandemic. So that was just not going to happen. And then the other aspect of this is that there's churn in the electorate every year. The pool of people who are eligible to vote in 2020 is not the same as the pool of people who are eligible to vote in 2024. And even among the people who are eligible, a lot of people who voted in 2020 didn't

choose not to vote in 2024 for various reasons. And a lot of people who didn't vote in 2020 did choose to vote in 2024. And so it's not like you have a snapshot in amber, which is a horrible mixed metaphor, but like a snapshot of the same voters and looking at how they performed differently in 2020 versus in 2024, it is in large part a different electorate. I think it's also worth noting just for the conversation about turnout, that some of this could make it sound like

Harris winning a lot fewer votes than Biden did could be a sign that like turnout was way down. But actually, right now, at least it looks like the turnout percentage of the voter eligible population voting eligible population is.

was not far away from 64%, which would still make it the second highest by that measure since the voting age was lowered to 18 ahead of the 1972 presidential election, second only to the 2020 election where 66% turned out. So it was still a high turnout election overall. And to this question about maybe turnout versus persuasion, which is related to Amy's question, oftentimes you will see that successful presidential candidates are able to do both

and oftentimes with the same message. It's not like you necessarily need to have one message to your base and one message to swing voters. That is an approach that politicians take, but folks like Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, or Trump himself seem to have a relatively broad message that both turned out people who would have been naturally part of their ideological coalition and also created converts.

Also related to this whole topic is our next question from Matthew. He asks,

I don't know about targeted messaging on crucial issues. I mean, I think to the point you were just making a moment ago, Galen, right? Some of these successful campaigns you're talking about that had a unified message that could do both turnout and persuasion to do even more targeted messaging than the Harris campaign was already doing, which to me at the time already felt a little bit fractured. I

I don't know if that would be as successful. I think a more unified message is probably like a easier, simpler way to go where you don't have to try to corral each of the different pieces of the coalition with their own special messaging. I don't know that this result doesn't feel vibes based to me. I think it's very vibes-y.

Well, I guess our vibes in conflict with fundamentals, because it seems like if you look at the people who are looking at the fundamentals, say, well, from an economic perspective, from a consumer sentiment perspective, it's not surprising the result that we got, you know, a one and a half point popular vote victory for the challenger isn't outside of historical norms for the fundamentals, right?

But I think when people say vibes, they're saying, oh, you know, the electorate's mindset is divorced from the fundamentals and is just sort of vibing out and behaving based on, I don't know, instinct or something like that, as opposed to reality. I mean, I don't think voters have ever, like, gone to check the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis statistics before they make their decisions. Right.

Fair enough. Right. I it's interesting. I kind of interpret the vibes as being aligned with the fundamentals. But I see how, you know, some people might argue the opposite. But I think that honestly just goes to the fact that vibes is a very vague term that we probably shouldn't be using in political analysis. But I do generally think that, you know.

The wording of the question was, was Harris doomed to fail? And I think that's a little strong. I don't think it was like totally set in stone. But I do think that the conditions, the overall conditions of the election made it very, very hard for her. And I'm not sure that any specific changes in campaign strategy or certainly tactics were.

would have made a difference for her so i have sort of two thoughts one is that the only thing that i can really point to with harris that is like a question mark for me and how it might have affected the election is sort of her her broad disinterest in separating herself from biden

I'm not saying that would be easy. She was literally the man's vice president. So that, I think, was always going to be an extremely challenging thing to do. But I do think that there were some notable opportunities that she did not take to do that. You know, I think people often bring up that with that interview and the view or whatever, where she said,

where she said, it's like, can you think of anything you would have done differently? And, you know, it was kind of like a 80 mile per hour fastball down the middle. And she just swung and missed by not saying anything. And it just seems like if you know that Joe Biden is an unpopular president and you're trying to make some distinctions, even if you can't separate yourself much, you might've had at least one answer, you know, in your wheelhouse about that, or one thing that you could point to you might've done differently. At the same time,

We're talking about like the vibes and whatnot, but we've seen an incumbent president or incumbent party lose before, even when maybe the numbers seem to be improving or seem to not be as bad as people were feeling in terms of the economic sentiment or things were turning around, but they didn't weren't feeling it quickly enough. And that's George H.W. Bush in 1992. You know, he lost reelection to Bill Clinton in the in the Ross Perot election when the three of them were on the ballot.

And what's interesting is that people had very negative attitudes about the economy, and the economy had had – I believe technically had had a recession. But –

If you look at sort of the numbers late in 1992 into early 1993, they actually were showing a lot of improvement. So it's sort of like did the turnaround come too late for Bush? Was his stewardship earlier on, some of the decisions he'd made like breaking his promise and going along with raising taxes, did those things actually work out for him in the long run? But the problem was he wasn't around much.

to enjoy them. So that's the, I just think that comes as an example as something that's, you can look back and people can talk about like the top line numbers of where Biden was and like where the economy is compared to where it was, but people weren't feeling it. So, you know, people have their sentiments and how they're actually feeling about the economy on a day-to-day basis versus, you know,

the top line numbers, which can tell a story but may not perfectly align with that. The other thing I mean, to Nathaniel's point, I totally understand where you're coming from when you're saying like vibes is a fake thing.

like that we maybe should put some meat around the bones of. I mean, I think the fundamentals are like, what is the economy doing? Like, what are the actions? Like, you know, your Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis stuff. But if you look at the way people felt about things, if we think of that as our measure of vibes, people were not happy with the status quo on November 5th, right? The direction of country numbers were like underwater by 35 points, right direction versus wrong track.

We have a really unpopular sitting president, right? Approval numbers among the lowest of in recent history. We have the top two issues that people say they want to vote on. They strongly disapprove of the current administration's handling. So like if we're going to measure vibes by how people feel in polls, the vibes are not good for the Democrats.

Right. I think vibes is actually like how people feel, right? That's the, like, it's short for like vibrations, like people's like, you know, vibrations and like, and so I don't think vibes refers to the literal data. I think it's how people feel and react to the data. Yeah. And we see in the polling data outside of the horse race, outside of all that stuff, it's there in the polling data that the vibes are not good. But I think what some want to say, maybe particularly on the left, is that the vibes are divorced from reality. Right.

And I've made this argument before on this podcast, but I would just say that that's not really true. You know, for the first three years of Biden's administration, Americans literally became poorer when you measure wage growth versus price growth. Prices grew much faster than wages for the majority of Biden's term in office. At the same time, we also saw a marked numerical difference in the migrant crisis, and people could see it in cities and whatnot. So it's not just that

You know, certain media outlets have a total monopoly on the American mind and have corrupted people so much that they're no longer reacting to reality. You know, these vibes are also rooted in reality. At the same time, part of this question is about, you know, ideological issues. Like, did Harris lose because of ideological issues?

Oftentimes, election victories get interpreted that way, like Trump will make the argument that he now has a mandate to enact all kinds of policies based on this win.

Because it is a lot about the fundamentals, what that also means is it probably wasn't necessarily the case that Trump did something magnificently right when it comes to politics or ideological positioning. So, you know, it's complicated. And if your question then is, who wins next and how do they do it? It's probably not as simple as change this one policy or that one policy either. Yeah, I think the secret to who wins next is...

don't be the incumbent party. Well, and to the extent that people on the left want to claim that the vibes are divorced from reality, it is quite literally the job of the Democratic candidate in this sort of circumstance to make that case to the American public. And that didn't happen. Yeah. I mean, they tried to say the economy is going great, but like,

Public opinion suggested people didn't feel that way. And so I don't know. It was it was it was I mean, it was a challenging hand for Harris to play in that sense. Like, how do you how do you make people feel better? I don't talk about things you want to do, perhaps, but that was that was a challenge for her. All right. Once again, related to all of this, a really interesting question.

The listener asks, in this election, the candidate with the lower favorability received the majority of votes. Have we ever seen this in the past? Well, when you're looking at favorability, the first thing to note is you can only go back to the 1976 election because that was when pollsters started asking this question. So prior to 1976, we have no answers for you.

So I went through all the elections back to 1976, and I only found one case where the candidate with higher favorability won fewer votes.

Although, to this listener's question, the candidate with the lower favorability did not win a majority. They won a plurality. And that was the 2000 election. So, no, I guess this has not happened before. Well, it did happen in 2000. So the listener, maybe the listeners have admitted their question before a bunch more ballots have been counted. But Trump hasn't won a majority of the popular vote. So if we just take the question to mean majority.

won more votes nationally than their opponent, then the two answers are 2000 and 2024. But in neither case did the less popular candidate win an outright majority. No.

No. And and in 2004, also, this is like really, really close. I think it kind of depends on how you calculate the average favorability, because we had both candidates above water by around five or six points. So depending on how you calculate the average favorability, you can argue about whether the more or less popular candidate in 2004 won more votes.

All right, so it is not totally an anomaly that Trump had a lower favorability rating and won more votes, but it doesn't happen all that often. And if you're interested in this topic, we did an entire audio

audio documentary project on the who would you rather have a beer with question and whether likability leads to electoral success. And the answer is that it doesn't. It's more about leadership and competency and getting things done. I think we're probably going to re-air that series during the holidays, so get excited. Um,

Next question is a fun one. Is there a way to quantify how many voters choose the candidate to vote for in a weird, a.k.a. nonpolitical way? For example, are there ones that really subconsciously or otherwise want to try and vote for a winner or literally decide with a coin toss? Nathaniel, do you have thoughts on this?

I do not. I do not know of any ways to quantify that because it's very difficult to judge how voters make their decisions because they will lie to you or they will perhaps lie to themselves. Yeah, we've talked about this before, but like research seems to show that people are really bad at explaining their own decision making processes. So we may never have a good way to quantify this.

Is there any evidence of bandwagoning in electoral politics that people do want to vote for a winner? Because when we talk about waiting by recalled vote, one of the challenges is that retrospectively, people will say that they voted for the winner at higher rates than they actually did. So are there people in the electorate who just want to be on the winning team?

In primaries, for sure, there's evidence that, you know, people want to make sure like, oh, I like multiple candidates and maybe I like this person who's at 5%, but between the two candidates who have a realistic chance of winning, I'm going to go with this person. And so that's why you see like these like big

big last minute surges before the Iowa caucus for certain candidates who are perceived to have momentum. I don't know about general elections, though, and I would imagine it's pretty difficult to tell because we haven't had an election recently where there was like a very clear, I guess Biden was clearly favored in 2020, but like we're just in this era of very close elections and very partisan elections, obviously, and there isn't going to be a lot of

Republicans being like, well, I'm a Republican, but I'm going to vote for the Democrat because I'm bandwagoning. Yeah. And I think it's also possible that we're in a period where it's a little easier to recall your vote because things are more partisan than maybe in the past when things were not quite as polarized. Yeah. Like, I don't remember if I voted for Eisenhower or Stevenson in 1956. Brum-tsch.

All right, next question. I was discussing the podcast on takes from the election with a friend, and we were trying to figure out if voters for whom abortion is a top issue are more likely to be pro-choice when compared to views across the general population. I'm sure there's polling on that somewhere, but we thought cold messaging you was also a valid approach to figuring that out. You are absolutely right, dear listener. There is plenty of polling on this, and the answer is straightforward. There are more people

pro-choice voters who prioritize the issue than pro-life voters. When Gallup looked at this earlier this year, it was actually a record high number of pro-choice voters who said that they would not vote for a candidate who did not share their views on abortion. I think it was somewhere in the range of 30%, which was significantly higher than the people who identified themselves as pro-life. You know,

I think there's maybe a broader question here, which is what role did abortion play in this election as an issue after it seemed like it stemmed some losses for Democrats in the 2022 midterms? Do we have any conclusions on that, Mary?

I mean, it's it was only listed as the top issue by 14 percent of voters in exit polls. I would be really I mean, obviously, exit polls have a lot of flaws and we should wait until we can get some more detailed, validated voter surveys. But that's less than the 2022 election. So it seems to have waned a little bit in its influence.

And in addition, among those voters that listed as a top issue, three quarters of them went for Harris, but a quarter of them still did vote for Trump. So it may while it does seem like it may be a top issue more for people on the pro-choice side, it may not necessarily be as closely tied to Trump as it is to perhaps other Republican candidates themselves.

in 2022. I mean, we have some evidence from polling that voters don't really believe that Trump is going to take extreme steps on abortion. Reuters Ipsos in a post-election polling asked if people thought that Trump would sign federal laws with new restrictions on abortion. And I think

Only 35 percent of respondents said that they thought that was extremely or very likely that he would do, whereas 30 percent also said they thought it was just not at all likely that this was going to happen. So this is pretty split. People don't associate with Donald Trump these extreme anti-abortion positions that they do with some other Republican candidates.

Well, OK, this brings up another question. This one's from Nick. I wanted to see if you could weigh in on a hot take that low information voters and misinformed voters swung the election to Trump. We've addressed this a little bit in the past. I've seen this, for instance, in a New Republic article. Quote, internal testing in all the battleground states over the course of many months yielded a result that unnerved the campaign, according to a senior Harris campaign operative who has seen the data. It was this.

Undecided voters didn't believe that some of the highest profile things that happened during Trump's presidency, even if they saw these things negatively, were his fault, they go on to say. And even on abortion, in all this testing, voters didn't hold Trump responsible for appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, something Trump openly boasted about during the campaign. So what do we make of this? Well, I do think it's worth noting that NBC News' final poll

If you split it by people who said that they followed politics closely, the voters leaned slightly toward the Democrats, slightly toward Harris. But the people who said they don't follow politics closely, Trump had a clear lead among that group. And so I think that speaks to something that we've talked about a lot in the last couple elections, which is that there may have been something of a shift in our politics where more low propensity voters were.

are more at least more open to voting Republican than maybe they were once. I think the thought used to be that higher turnout was automatically good for Democrats. But that may not be true anymore, based on what we've seen in the last couple elections, even when Biden won in 2020, you know, Trump did outperform his polls and

You know, it was a it was a close election, at least in the electoral college at the end of the day. And this time around, Trump outperformed his polls, not by as much, but still did so and seems to have done better among voters who were less engaged. So that, you know, I think that's sort of my takeaway from it is that, again, higher turnout now may actually be good for Republicans.

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I want to add this question into this conversation because it's something that we get a lot. And I think it's from a particular perspective, which is, oh, I can't imagine somebody voting for the other party. They must be misinformed. And I think that's not a generous interpretation of election results or even a rigorous one. But let me just read this question to add it in and we can continue the conversation. Are election behaviors being driven by social media algorithms rather than more traditional methods of persuasion?

We know that social media use drives people toward extreme viewpoints based on misinformation. Could we use the data to determine if this is happening? You've shared data in the past on which groups of people get their news primarily from social media. Do we see greater shifts toward Trump in those groups?

Well, I'm not sure what the answer to that question is, but I'd like to add something in here that addresses this issue of misinformation. I don't necessarily think that in all these cases voters are misinformed. I think that this is something that has been a part of the way the American electorate thinks about Donald Trump, lo, this last decade, that they just don't quite

Take him seriously. I mean, even Kamala Harris said just that in her acceptance speech at the DNC, that Trump is not a serious man. And you can see evidence of this in the polling. You know, I cited that Reuters Ipsos polling where people don't believe that Donald Trump is going to do certain things that he said is going to do. There's other examples of that, too. If you look at the final New York Times Siena College poll, for example, nationally, it

Among likely voters, they asked about some of the extreme types of things that Trump had said he was going to do. And Trump voters generally were inclined to say that he's not being serious about those things, whereas Harris voters said that he was. So this is almost exactly what happened in 2016, right? We had this whole narrative about whether we should take Trump seriously or literally, and I think we're still in it, right?

Right. I think people inclined to vote for Donald Trump are inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt and think that he's just, you know, saying stuff and not take it all so literally. And people inclined to vote for Kamala Harris are still taking the things that he says completely literally, as Democrats have done since Donald Trump came onto the political scene. Yeah, I mean, I think I would agree.

go even broader than Jeffrey and Mary and say that, yes, low information voters swung this election to Trump. They also swung the 2020 election to Biden and the 2016 election to Trump and the 2012 and 2008 elections to Obama and the 2000 and 2004 elections to Bush, because I think most Americans just are not as tuned into politics as listeners to this podcast would like.

I talk about this all the time, that one of the biggest divides in politics is between the 20% of Americans who pay close attention to politics and the 80% of Americans who don't. You can argue maybe exactly where those numbers stand, but if you are one of the people on this podcast or you are one of the people paying attention to the podcast, you are very unique in American life in that you are this tuned in to what makes people tick, but

But thank you. We really appreciate you and love you. But yes, but thank you. Thank you. And thank you in this case for being so engaged that you're even sending us questions.

And with that, let's move on to the next one. Here's the question. You've discussed how the main reason vice presidential picks influence elections is their reflection on the presidential candidates. Do cabinet picks have similar effects? For example, if Gates or others are not confirmed, could it affect the president's approval rating? I think this is the kind of thing where it's a little difficult to disentangle.

the sort of broader actions that a president takes and an individual thing like nominating someone who's unpopular. Obviously, Gates withdrew because it looked like he actually might have gotten voted down if the confirmation process had continued for him. But I think at the end of the day, it's like Trump's choice to nominate people who are going to not look great could weigh negatively on how people view him. They could say, well,

I gave him a chance because I'm not happy with how things are going, but he's doing exactly the kind of stuff that I didn't really want him to do. It's like people saying they don't like his tweets, but they like other things that he does. They wish he wouldn't tweet so much. I mean we had that for years when he was president. So I think it's just like –

There are things that – like actions he will take, including the choices he makes about his cabinet and the kind of people he associates himself with, that could affect his approval rating somewhat at the margins. I think that's perfectly reasonable, but I think it's hard to say Matt Gaetz specifically.

X, Y, Z. Yeah. To your point, Galen, about people not paying attention, the number of people that are going to hear about these cabinet nominees in any detail whatsoever has got to be vanishingly small. Yes. Yes. Thank you for tying those two together. We're going to get into a couple of the wonkier questions here. Here's one. Why didn't the number of undecided or third party voters shrink?

shrink considerably as the election date was closing in.

So we generally expect this to happen. And this listener sent us the data from a month before the election when the data was actually frozen and then the actual result. And you will see that in 2020 and 2024, there's say, you know, a month before the election, about 6% of people are not committed to one of the two major parties. The day of in the polling, it's about 5%. But the actual result is closer to 2%. So, yeah.

The listener is asking what's going on. Why are the polls, I guess, off in terms of representing how small of a portion of the electorate is voting third party or is undecided or voting third party?

Well, OK, so I think there are a few things here. First of all, is that in polls, there are undecided voters and the election results there are not. So there are always going to be fewer. It looks like this person is kind of combining third party and undecided voters. And obviously, all those undecided voters are going to disappear in the polls going to the results. So there's that. And then I think to the broader question, though, I think the answer is just that

people were in a very partisan age and people know who they're going to vote for earlier than ever. And so a month before the election, pretty much everybody had made their mind up at that point. And I think if you had gone back further, you did see obviously before Biden dropped out, RFK was doing better in the polls, for example. But even if you went back further, I mean, the polls were remarkably steady this whole cycle. And I think that that just reflects

how there are fewer swing voters than ever. I mean, if we had mandatory voting, so people just might show up and spoil their ballots, you know, like in Australia, then maybe we would be able to have an easier count of undecideds actually panning out. But we don't do that here. So, yeah, to Nathaniel's point, we just have...

There are no undecided votes counted at the end of the day. Except in Nevada. Except in Nevada, I guess, for none of the above. Let me be true about that. Except for Nevada, they do have a none of the above option for statewide races. All right. Next question. What's the deal with internal polling? Do private polls have the same resources as public polls? Are they just polling more specific questions than public polling? Why is it something campaigns think is worth spending money on?

Well, they're certainly asking different kinds of questions in internal polls than you're going to see in public polls. In particular, campaigns really care about spending money to determine whether their messaging has been effective, right? If they're going to spend a lot of money on ads, they want to make sure those ads have the intended outcome. So they're going to be doing a lot of poll testing of the different kinds of messages, the different kinds of ads, the different kinds of policies to make sure that the way they're presenting their candidate and their campaign is resonating with people.

which is one of the big reasons that campaigns are willing to shell out money, because they're not interested in just what's the horse race. They're interested in what could I do to change those numbers for the candidate that we are advocating for? So I think that's one of the big reasons that campaigns are still willing to spend a lot of money is that they're not they're asking a lot of questions that you're never going to see in their memos. Yeah. OK, next question from Joel. I'm curious how post-election data can show demographic voting trends so quickly. Great question, Joel.

Are there some tools that eventually allow a correlation between how people voted and their demographics? I can't imagine such data is immediately available after the election. All of these articles about how, say, Hispanics have shifted away from Democrats or how white people making more than 100 grand shifted towards Democrats. How is that data collected? Joel, you are asking what is up with exit polling and perhaps will we ever get better data? We are glad you asked. Nathaniel, what's your answer for Joel?

Yeah. So basically, I would say that the further away you get from the election, the more reliable that data will be. As Galen mentioned off the top of the podcast, there are going to be some great studies that come out next year from places like the CES, which I've forgotten what that stands for these days. The Cooperative Election Study.

And like Catalyst and like the Pew Research Center that do these verified voter studies that like really take care to look at, like to verify that people voted and look at how they voted or they'll ask them how they voted and they'll get all sorts of interesting demographic crosstabs. The exit polls...

They are basically just big polls. So they are not the kind of traditional thing that you might think of that the term exit poll implies, which is people they are in part this, but people standing outside polling places with clipboards being like, hey, stopping every voter, every 10th voter or something saying like, hey, how'd you vote and give me all this information about yourself?

Because obviously that doesn't really work so well in a world where half of people vote by mail or vote early, and it's just harder to get that sample. And so exit polls are basically just a big poll. They are a high quality poll to be sure, but it involves a lot of phone calls still. It does involve some in-person data collection, but they are prone to the same types of errors that regular polls are prone to. And importantly, on election night, they are not super accurate because it's

The kind of one neat trick that exit polls do is that days after the election, you know, we still don't have all the full results or, you know, states are basically wrapping up their counts right now. But days after the election, weeks after the election, the exit polls are weighted to the final results.

Which, of course, we don't necessarily know, certainly at 5 p.m. on election night, but even at midnight on election night. And so that can change, for example, how many Latinos say that they voted for Harris versus Trump because if the initial sample was too good for Harris, then you have to weight that and change that. So a lot of the articles that you saw, especially the ones written like the day or two after the election about that, those are

rely on polls that are as fallible as other polls. And I would really caution. I know, obviously, there's a huge appetite for what happened in the election and explanations immediately afterward. But for the absolute best of those things, you really do have to wait until like the summer of the following year when, unfortunately, a lot of these narratives have already set in. And, you know, they're there, I believe, in the

2022, there was a narrative about like young voters being really strong for Democrats that ended up not really panning out in the data. So there is that danger that there are false narratives that set in early. And so just make sure that anything you read these days, you kind of

Take with a grain of salt. You're open to updating it when more data comes. Exactly. Yeah, we're still fighting the idea that Biden did better among white non-college voters than previous Democratic candidates. So we're nearing the end here, and we have not gotten through everyone's questions, but maybe we'll do this one more time before we move on from the 2024 election. But I do want to close with this. And Mary, you can kick us off.

What is the biggest remaining question that you have about the 2024 election? Well, to Nathaniel's point about demographic data, I'm pretty excited to get detailed precinct level data for some of the urban areas in our country, especially because there's been a lot of conversation about how urban voters may be changed locally.

in terms of their demographics, maybe change in terms of who they're voting for. I'm really interested to see if we can see any patterns like among precincts that are predominantly Hispanic or predominantly Black in terms of who turned out and what the ultimate vote share was in those precincts. I think that's another way to get at this question about demographics that Nathaniel is discussing without using polling, using hard data and saying, you know, if we look at the

precincts in Philadelphia that are predominantly black, what can we say about the turnout and the results there? I think that'll be a really interesting set of data to dig into once we have it available across all the states.

Yeah, I think, you know, the main thing is the verified voter surveys that I talked about. But in the interest of providing maybe a different answer, I'm curious to see some of the trends on the congressional district level. You know, it also takes time to calculate who which presidential candidate won each congressional district, which obviously is then relevant for subsequent special elections and the midterms.

And so I'm really curious. I know that, for instance, like the big swings in New Jersey, there was one district in New Jersey, the ninth district that Trump may actually have carried that we all thought was a safe Democratic district. So stuff like that, I'm going to be really interested to see. Yeah, get ready for the New Jersey gubernatorial election in 2025, folks.

But Jeffrey, close us out here. I think something that's going to be fascinating, something I'd like to see studies on and do a little digging myself once we have some of this individual level data from some of those larger surveys, is trying to maybe make sense of something that I've been asked about, which is

When we've talked about how people are feeling about the economy and some of the shifts we saw at least have – we have an initial idea that Trump made gains among Hispanic voters, for instance, and possibly some voters who are lower income or less affluent. I'm interested in seeing if one of the reasons why you have this narrative on the left about people being misinformed or not feeling the reality or whatever –

Is in part because more affluent voters just simply didn't feel the economic headwinds as much in the last few years. And so they were less likely to have a negative opinion about them and feel less hurt by inflation. So did that help contribute, for instance, to Harris looking like she may not have done much more poorly among white voters who just because of all kinds of socioeconomic reasons are –

More likely to have a college degree, more affluent overall. And older voters, same story there, who happen to be whiter as well. So he's kind of trying to disentangle some of that information and trying to understand how much that contributed to Trump's gains among certain groups of voters in this election versus ones where maybe he didn't make as much headway. All right. Well, all of this to come. We're going to leave it there for today. Thank you, Jeffrey, Nathaniel, and Mary.

Thanks, Galen. Thank you, Galen. Thank you, Galen. My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Shurtavian. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at FiveThirtyEight.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 a review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening and we will see you soon.

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