Do Scandals Like Herschel Walker's Still Matter To Voters?
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Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. On Monday, the Daily Beast reported that Herschel Walker, who's running as an anti-abortion Republican Senate candidate in Georgia, paid for his girlfriend's abortion in 2009.

Walker has denied the claims. However, the woman who spoke with the Daily Beast provided a receipt from the abortion clinic, a get-well card from Walker, and a personal check from him that aligns with the date of the abortion. In response, Walker's son, a conservative social media star, has said he is, quote, done with his dad and has posted several videos criticizing him. He also tweeted that Walker threatened to kill both he and his mom. Here's an example of what he had to say.

Family values people. He has four kids, four different women, wasn't in the house raising one of them. He was out having sex with other women. Do you care about family values? I have a silent lie after lie after lie. The abortion card drops yesterday. It's literally his handwriting in the car. They say they have receipts, whatever. He gets on Twitter. He lies about it. Okay, I'm done.

Done. Everything has been a lie. This has raised the question of just how much this type of scandal could shape the Senate race in Georgia in a year when abortion is already at the forefront of voters' minds. And Georgia is a particularly important state for both parties. In fact, according to our forecast, it's the likeliest tipping point state in the Senate. Or, that is to say, the likeliest state to put either party over the edge in the Senate.

In the Trump era, there's been some suggestion that scandals don't matter all that much anymore. After all, Trump faced an unprecedented number of scandals in 2016 and still managed to win election.

He continued to face scandals throughout his tenure in office and never lost the support of his party. But when you actually look at the data, that's what we do here at FiveThirtyEight, on scandals, a different picture comes into focus. And that's what we're going to talk about today. So here with me to discuss is Editor-in-Chief Nate Silver. Hey, Nate. How's it going? Hey, everybody.

Also here with us is senior elections analyst, Nathaniel Rakich. How are you? I'm good, Galen. How are you? I'm doing pretty well. I am in studio as folks who are watching this on YouTube or on our website can see. It's fun. I have Fivie Fox is here with me to help host. Hey, Fivie.

We got a really nice background, some fantastic lighting. I got to say, the lighting in the studio really puts the lighting in my apartment to shame. You are positively glowing, Galen. Thank you, Nathaniel. I'm so flattered. But let's get to what we came here to discuss, which is the scandal facing Herschel Walker. We'll also broaden this out later to talk about scandals more generally. So it hasn't been very long. But Nathaniel, have we gotten any polling yet to indicate how voters are reacting to this news?

We actually have had a poll, and it was just a one-day poll, small sample, but it was from Insider Advantage and Fox 5, the Fox station in Atlanta. And they actually were in the field conducting a poll when this news broke. And their data from Monday before the story broke showed Raphael Warnock, the Democratic incumbent in this race, with a one-point lead over Herschel Walker. And then on Tuesday, the kind of

post-story poll, they showed Ornok with a three-point lead. So you could look at that and say the story hurt Walker a little bit, but also at the same time, that's within the margin of error. But of course, in general, this is just one poll. I think we need to wait for more data and also just kind of let the story sink in, percolate a little bit.

Nate, how are you thinking about how this shapes the election in Georgia? I mean, one piece of data that we have about Georgia from the work that we've done in the past is that Georgia is the second least elastic state in the country. It's kind of like the third least elastic entity, if you consider Washington, D.C., which is the absolute least elastic. That suggests that there aren't all that many swing voters. Should we still expect this to have an impact? Yes.

People have a lot of bad takes about the effect of scandals.

Your default should be to assume that a scandal of this magnitude, and we can debate why this case is weird in certain ways, right? But the default should be that a scandal matters. On average, in our historical research, it moves the race by something like eight or nine points of net margin. There's good reason to think that's smaller now that sample is taken from a period where there was lower partisanship. Maybe it's half that now. And Georgia is one of these more polarized states.

low elasticity states, but like you should expect scandals to matter and not pay attention to these LOL nothing matters takes that are not really based on people being very rigorous. For people who aren't as online as maybe we are, Nate, can you explain what you mean by the LOL nothing matters take? I mean, I think there's a perception that set in partly because of, well, maybe largely because of Trump, right? That like,

Voters are so partisan now that you can shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and it won't affect people's votes. It's Trump's kind of famous quote. And I think that's to a first approximation wrong or exaggerated. I mean, first off, you look at like Trump himself.

Trump actually kind of underperformed how a typical incumbent would do in 2020. In 2016, you had two scandalous candidates. Rick, would you agree or not? Like Hillary Clinton's private email server, even if I think the story was overcovered by the media, would certainly qualify as a scandal by our standards, right? Right.

I mean, and both candidates were certainly seen by the public as problematic. They were both scandal plague. Yeah, they were both underwater by a significant clip. So Trump, people say, oh, it doesn't matter. He lost to Hillary Clinton, who's

not in the top tier, let's just say, of electable candidates by two points in the popular vote, won the electoral college, of course, lost to Joe Biden as an incumbent by four and a half points, lots of complications with COVID and the economy and everything else. But like Trump did not do particularly well. And so if that's kind of the example that people hold out, the other thing is that like,

Most congressional races, most of which are House races, there are 435 House races, 35-ish Senate races, are not competitive. So you have a district where some Democrat would ordinarily win by 60 points, and then there's some corruption scandal, and he wins by 51 points, right? You're not going to necessarily notice that impact. And so that can create, I think, false perceptions. I mean, look, it is always true that you want to wait for the poll. I will mention with that Insider Advantage poll that they had also, they tend to be one of the more Republican-leaning firms, right?

their previous poll had had Walker ahead. So it's not just that Warnock plus one from a small one-day sample. It's also that their previous polling had shown Walker plus three. But this, you know, if there's like somewhere in the neighborhood of like a three-year something point shift, then that would be in line with my prior. I mean, I think the one other complication that Rankage may bring up is like Walker already was scandal plagued. So the question is like, kind of, will

This move voters at the margin since people already had reason not to vote for him, to which I'd say a couple of things.

Number one, I mean, if you look, let's look at the 538 model. Come on, Nate, you got to let Nathaniel actually make the argument before you robot it. You can't turn this podcast into a monologue, man. I will pass. I will pass the ball. Thank you. Thanks, Nate. I got it. You got the conch. My expectation is that it will probably hurt Walker a little bit. Probably not the nine points for reasons of polarization, for reasons of just diversity.

in elasticity in Georgia. The thing for me is that like Walker was not already a particularly strong candidate. He already had, he was already kind of tagged with this scandal variable that we use in our forecast because of past scandals that he has had. So I think the most serious of these is that several years ago, he threatened to kill his ex-wife as Christian Walker kind of re-

brought up the other day. He also has had problems with unpaid debts. He has allegedly violated campaign finance laws. Obviously, some of these are not as significant as others. But oh, and then there was the revelation over the summer that he had fathered three children that he had not previously made public. And Nathaniel, to add a little bit,

of detail to the claims that have already been made. His ex-wife claimed that he held a gun to her head, threatened her with knives, and threatened to kill her with a razor. And this sort of came out in divorce proceedings. And Warnock has already been, and Democrats have already been running ads informing the Georgian public about these scandals. Yeah, exactly. So my thought with Walker is that

People who would be swayed at the margins by – maybe they would vote for a strong Republican candidate, somebody who's likable and all of those things, but wouldn't vote for someone who is – Like Brian Kemp? Yeah, there you go. Brian Kemp, a Republican candidate for governor, of course, in Georgia, who is outrunning Hershel Walker in the polls. My feeling is that those folks have already –

kind of left Walker as a result of these earlier scandals. I'm just not sure who the voter is, who's out there, who is still with him after those scandals, but who is going to be persuaded not to vote for him because of this abortion story. So now, Nate, here's the ball, passing it over to you. First of all, one thing I'd say is, I guess I haven't really looked at the effect of multiple scandals. I mean, you now have these like Madison Cawthorn, I think holds the record for having, I think,

746 scandals simultaneously in our database or something. Not literally, but like... Three Stooges Syndrome, right, Nate? Three Stooges Syndrome, right? So we don't know if there's diminishing returns. There probably is some, but the fact that the model kind of just has scandals on and off doesn't mean that that's how it exists in the real world, right? It's just a simplification because usually you don't have multiple simultaneous scandals. I mean, my thing is like, I think salience...

is a big deal, right? What do voters focus on? What does the media focus on? There have been a lot of talk recently about in some other Senate races shifting away from focusing on the flaws of GOP candidates more toward the economy and immigration and the fundamentals. This makes it much harder for that to happen in Georgia, particularly given, frankly, the fact that you have Herschel Walker's son, who is very loudly kind of shining a light

on this, right? And who is not some liberal flower child exactly, right? Identifies as pretty conservative. I think actually his social media history is interesting. Sometimes it seems like he is like trolling a bit. You can debate kind of how tongue in cheek things are or not.

But this is his son, a very credible source in many respects, right, who is like trying to draw attention to this. And I think just the timing where it's like a month from the election, I think it's difficult. I don't know. I mean, Walker also was behind in the race to begin with. He had been behind by about two points, somewhat confusingly.

A SurveyUSA poll came out today that was mostly conducted, 95% pre-scandal that had Walker down double digits, right? But most of the close Senate races have shifted toward the GOP. This one hadn't, and I think it's less likely now that it does. I don't know. I think this is a problem for Republicans. Yeah. I mean, yeah. I think a couple weeks ago, you kind of said, which race is –

Do you have a subjective view that differs from the model, right? Georgia was the one race where I thought subjectively I liked Warnock's chances a little bit better than the model, right? Because Georgia is a very, very purple state. Warnock is an incumbent and Walker has lots of problems as a candidate. So this is not like Ohio or something where you expected the race to tighten. This is a race where it kind of seemed like

you know, Warnock had some room to grow maybe. So I don't know. I,

This is not a welcome development for Republicans and offsets some of the momentum they have in other Senate races. Yeah, of course. So when you're in the final stretch of a campaign and you're down, you don't have to just hold steady. You have to make up ground at any day that you're not making up ground. You know, the forecast is going to work against you, so to say. But can we focus in on the actual issue that was brought up by the scandal for a second, which is abortion? Because previously the scandals facing Walker were,

while they were pretty severe, they didn't touch on the cultural issue of the moment. And I'm curious if this plays in a different way, because having secret children is perhaps salacious, but doesn't really run counter to a pro-life position. So does this affect the race or perceptions of Walker in a way that some of these other things don't?

I mean, you'd have to ask an evangelical voter in Georgia. My worth-nothing intuition is that, yeah, it's not the fact that abortion is an issue per se. I mean, abortion is important to a lot of voters in Georgia and other states for lots of reasons. But I think it kind of makes them look like a hypocrite. Sure.

Makes him look like he's not a good Christian family man. And I don't know. Right. I mean, one thing that can happen in these races, too, and these can be a little harder to capture in polls is voters just might not turn out. Right. They might say, you know what, I'm not going to get off my ass and vote for Hershel Walker if I were to make it to the polling place. That's who I would vote for. But really, I couldn't be bothered. I think that's sometimes a reaction that would affect voters.

turnout more than people going, okay, now I'm going to vote for Warnock. Even when Brian Kemp is at the top of the ticket doing things that you want him to do, like making conservative changes to state legislation? I could see people voting for Brian Kemp, but just leaving the Senate race blank to Nate's point. But yeah, I think turnout's going to be high regardless. Yeah, you could undervote that race. In our modeling, that Kemp race is not particularly...

I'm sure we'll have some Stacey Abrams fans who don't like hearing that. But what do we have that race at? It's likely R, yeah. 86%. So this Georgia race got a little closer. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, is that race perceived to be competitive enough in Georgia that would motivate that marginal voter? I don't know exactly. Yeah. And based on the Georgia media coverage that I follow, they're treating it like a competitive race. Yeah.

Nathaniel, do you have thoughts on this? I know that you've looked at lots of polling throughout the summer and beyond about how voters view abortion as an issue.

Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting question. I definitely agree with Nate that like the hypocrisy is what is really at issue here. I do think it's maybe interesting that you have another candidate actually in Oregon's 6th district, Mike Erickson, who is in the same situation, who is not doing too well. So sorry to back up. He is a Republican candidate who back in, I think it was 2008,

paid for his girlfriend to get an abortion. And this is like a light blue seat. So you would expect the Democrat to do well here. And that is indeed what's happening. So right now we give the Democrat a 71 in 100 chance of winning the seat. But a lot of that is actually based on the

This isn't a deluxe version of the model. A lot of that is actually based on the expert ratings. And if you look at the classic version of the model that just looks at the polls and the fundamentals and kind of just the 538 view of the race, it's actually a toss up. So it doesn't necessarily seem to be hurting Ericsson there.

Yeah, I mean, Walker supports a total abortion ban that is not popular in Georgia. This could serve to highlight his support for that. I think I actually saw that Democrats are going to be going up with a new ad campaign, TV ad campaign, that's highlighting his support for a total abortion ban. So you could see that playing into that. But yeah, I do kind of tend to think that, to Nate's point, this takes the conversation off

issues like inflation that Walker would might rather be talking about and puts it on to things like abortion and his other scandals. But a big question for me is how long that lasts. Obviously, I think voters and the media have short attention spans. It wouldn't surprise me to see Walker dip in the polls in the next few weeks. But by election day, I think to kind of revert to where you might expect.

We've made some passing mentions of how scandals are treated by the forecast. And based on research that I know what both of you have done, we've determined that scandals are significant enough in elections that the model should consider them and make adjustments accordingly. Nate, how exactly does the model process a scandal plagued candidate? So Rakich keeps, Nathaniel I should say, keeps a master list

of scandals. Sometimes we have debates about what qualifies and,

And what doesn't? But clearly this Walker thing. Wait, hold on. No, actually, it doesn't qualify because hypocrisy doesn't qualify. And there's nothing illegal about paying for your girlfriend's abortion. Oh, it doesn't qualify. Yeah, hypocrisy does not qualify. He is already marked as a scandalous candidate because of his previous scandals. But this and by the way, so is Raphael Warnock. Raphael Warnock is marked as a scandalous candidate because of accusations of misuse of campaign funds.

But this would not earn a demarcation of scandal just on its own. Because if, as Nathaniel has pointed out, if you had to basically pull the scandal lever for any candidate who is hypocritical, we would just have 435 scandalous candidates. I like how in the UK...

Party gate for Boris Johnson was a big deal in America. Damn it. We assume our politicians are hypocrites, right? We assume I could give a fuck about the average person right? The UK is so naive No, I mean, but look so this is kind of where you go from the strength to weaknesses of like having to have a rule-based objective System, which generally I believe in, you know, I think this is a case where I

The average person in Georgia would consider this scandalous behavior from Walker and would not consider Warnock's scandal particularly salient. And that's OK, because we'd rather have a set of rules to follow than be totally subjective. But if you're making a forecast, which is me, saying where would I put my money, right, then both Predict It and our model says it's 60-40-50.

Warnock, I think that seems a little low to me. Wait, wait, wait. Can we take it back to the original question, which is what actual impact does it have on a candidate's odds in the forecast once you pull that scandal lever? So it's complicated because that goes into the so-called fundamentals. And how much you weight the fundamentals against the polls depends on how much polling there is, right? This race has been robustly polled, which means that like,

the fundamentals don't matter much at all. In the deluxe forecast, the expert ratings still matter. So if the Cook Political Report says we're going to shift the race toward Warnock, right, then that would matter. But the answer is like, in practice, it won't matter because this is a whale pole late in the race. Also, a couple of things to keep in mind about our scandals. We also find like the amount of time since the scandal was disclosed is

important, right? If you had a scandal back in 1990 and you've been reelected to 20 terms in the US House, we assume that's now out of the system, right? The fact that revealed preference of voters is to say that, no, we don't care, right? Then that scandal has a very big diminishing returns and basically doesn't matter in the model anymore. So a new fresh scandal is the one where it can sometimes have an impact.

I want to dig a little bit more into the scandal database and talk about how scandals have been shaping this midterm cycle overall.

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Nathaniel, as Nate mentioned, you have been dutifully tracking every scandal that has come up this cycle and determined whether or not it qualifies as a 538 forecast worthy scandal. How many candidates are scandal plagued at this point?

Yeah. So right now we have tagged 49 candidates for Senate, House or governor with the scandal tag. And these really run the gamut from kind of fairly anodyne campaign finance scandals to kind of really

crazy, salacious, extremely bad things like I think Herschel Walker threatening to kill his wife, I think is one of those extreme examples. And I think that this is also kind of an important to tonight's earlier point, which is that the model does not try to make a differentiation between the severity of scandals. Right. And that can obviously matter quite a bit. And I do think that there is a differentiation in real life. And that might be a case where, for example, the expert ratings

You know, if Cook Political Report were to shift the Georgia Senate race toward Warnock as a result of this, that's a good example of like a value add, I think, of those expert ratings. But yeah, so we, as you said, Galen, we kind of flipped that switch. And if especially in races like House races where there isn't a lot of polling and the fundamentals do tend to take more precedence, it can take a few points or sometimes several points off a candidate's projected vote margin.

So I was looking through this database earlier today and I just have to go off on a tangent here for a second. Or maybe this isn't a tangent because this has to do with scandals. But like what the actual fuck

is happening in Florida's first congressional district because both the Republican and Democrat have a, I mean, I'm just going to read this. So Matt Gaetz is the incumbent Republican running for reelection in Florida's first congressional district. Here's the list. A DWI, witness intimidation, misuse of funds, sex with underage girl, drug use, prostitution, corruption, obstruction of justice,

Rebecca Jones, the Democrat running against him, battery, trespassing, adultery, criminal mischief, abuse of power, robbery, contempt of court, stalking, hacking. What? This is not the best looking race for Florida. The state of Florida, it's like Florida man and Florida woman going at it. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Yeah. Can you explain what's happening, Nathaniel?

I mean, what's happening is two extremely flawed candidates are running. And this is an example where, you know, in this case, the two scandals in our model, at least, would cancel each other out, right? You might think that Matt Gaetz, who has had this very highly publicized scandal in which he has allegedly paid for sex with underage girls and move them across state lines and use drugs with them and stuff like that. But his Democratic opponent has completely

quite a rap sheet of her own. So she has been arrested for battery of a police officer. She allegedly had an affair with one of her students when she was teaching at Florida State University and stalked him. And the boyfriend had to get a domestic abuse injunction against her. And she also has been accused of hacking into the email system of the Florida Department of Health after they fired her. It's just a flawed candidate running against a flawed candidate. Folks, we can do better.

Can we? Maybe that's a question. We can do better. Can Florida, though? It's not fair to beat up on Florida right now. Florida's going through it. We love you, Florida. That's fair. Florida, you have 27 other congressional districts where the candidate, well, actually, I'm not sure if there are any other. Let's see.

There's one other scandal-plagued candidate in Florida for financial nondisclosure, so that is not nearly as salacious. This is John Rutherford in the 5th District. Let me see. What's the most scandal-plagued state by proportion? By proportion, it's difficult. Texas has...

One, two, three, four, five. But Texas also has a lot of congressional districts. So maybe that's not necessarily fair. It might be Georgia, honestly. Georgia has five.

Oh, wow. There you go. Herschel Walker, Raphael Warnock, Stanford Bishop, who has been accused of misuse of funds, David Scott, who's been accused of being late on his taxes, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who also has been accused of some malfeasance with her taxes, and also is Marjorie Taylor Greene. But that doesn't show up in our scandal variable. Nathaniel, I see that in this database, Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania is not marked as a scandal-plagued candidate, which I

I think makes sense. But around the same time that the news about Herschel Walker came out, Jezebel published a piece that appears to be some kind of opposition research dump on Dr. Oz and experiments that were conducted at Columbia University with his name sort of on the top of the study where animals were tested on and as a result killed.

Fetterman's campaign is leaning into this? Like, how do you go about and, you know, like Democrats on Twitter are talking a lot about it. I would be curious to hear what Columbia University has to say about it and whether or not Columbia University is receiving much ire from all of these people on Twitter, considering that this is research that was conducted at Columbia University. But how do you go about determining whether or not this counts as a scandal? Well, so that Oz thing, I'm kind of

keeping an eye on. You know, it was reported in Jezebel. I'd like to see it in some more kind of, let's call them traditional news outlets, Pennsylvania news outlets. It's unclear to me to what degree this is just frankly normal when conducting scientific studies of that nature. So I'm not really sure what to make of that scandal quite yet, but I can't answer the general question of when to give Canada a scandal label. So

So basically, as Nate alluded to earlier, we have as objective a standard as possible to determine what qualifies as a scandal, because I think this is particularly something that can be subject to interpretation. And at FiveThirtyEight, we like to take human judgment calls out of the equation as much as possible. So what we've done is we've defined a scandal as a credible accusation of wrongdoing according to some legal or ethical standard.

So like somebody has to break the law or commit a basically universally agreed upon moral transgression. And obviously people's morals are different, but we kind of had to have a little loophole in there for something like adultery, kind of a classic sex scandal, which is again, the kind of epitome of a political scandal in many ways, but of course is not actually illegal. So we have tried to take things like making kind of like controversial comments,

You know, so like think about Steve King and his racist comments, white nationalist comments, those types of things don't qualify as scandals, even though they can still hurt candidates, of course, right? It's not like we're saying everything that isn't a scandal doesn't hurt a candidate. Like that's clearly not true. The Herschel Walker abortion story is a good example where the hypocrisy could hurt him, even if it doesn't meet our definition of a scandal.

But so we try to keep it to kind of an objective legal or ethical standard. Basically, as soon as somebody is credibly accused of that, we're willing to flip the switch. It doesn't have to be proven guilty. You know, they don't have to be indicted or something like that. Like, again, some examples would be a woman accusing a candidate of unwanted sexual advances. And that kind of thing is rarely proven, but it is enough to kind of cast a cloud around the candidate.

often. And for our purposes, that is enough to kind of give them a demerit in the model. Thivey likes to be very rigorous and transparent. And so he's sort of just generally curious here. You can see him on screen if you're watching the video. A lot of what we're talking about here comes under the umbrella of October surprises, which can be either

planned or by dint of nature, like hurricanes can be October surprises, things that the FBI do can be October surprises, but also parties do a lot of research and dig up dirt on candidates that they plan to release at a time that will have the most impact. Is that like a strategy that oftentimes works? And what is the period of time between an oppo dump and election that really makes a difference if we're talking about partisan actors here? I mean, there are probably different

perspectives on this. I mean, first of all, like we shouldn't assume that a scandal comes out when a party wants it to, because the media outlet may vet the story. They will probably publish it as soon as they are comfortable that the story is true and that story won't get them sued. It won't make them lose a lawsuit. They might get sued.

There are probably some news outlets that on the very eve of an election might be reluctant to publish a new disclosure of some kind. I think the more traditional outlets might kind of have some misgivings potentially. So, yeah, we don't know. Maybe this was kind of released initially in August, for example, and the Daily Beast took six weeks to verify it or something, right? Yeah, we don't. I should be clear. We don't know the story behind this specific story or the Jezebel story for that matter.

Without naming particular outlets, right, one thing you should look at, is this an outlet that typically breaks news? For Daily Beast, there's a fair bit of investigative reporting. And so a place that does have a history of investigative reporting, I would think the scandal is a little bit more robust than a place that is more likely to kind of pass along a claim that

without the same level of due diligence, right? And so, you know, also things are teaching about in terms of that's perceived as non-partisan. You might prefer if you're a Democrat for the Wall Street Journal to disclose your opposition research item than the New York Times, because the Times is seen as a liberal paper, fairly or not, and the Journal is seen as a moderate or conservative paper, fairly or not. I mean, I think this would be like kind of in the window where you probably don't want

A scandal that kind of breaks at the very last minute. People might think it's a dirty trick. If you're relying on a reliable news outlet to vet it, they might not get that investigation done on time. There is early voting now. Georgia is a state with a lot of early voting. And so you might literally have some people who learned about the scandal too late to change their mind. So this is like in the window when you might have an opposition research dump, given that you don't exactly know when it will land.

Yeah, I would just add, I think that point about early voting is very important that, you know, an October surprise, kind of a traditional one, like an October 31st surprise, would not have, or you would think would not have the same impact today that it might have in the 1990s. Because even before the pandemic in 2018, roughly 40% of people nationwide cast their ballots before election day. And you would imagine that number will go up and probably not as high as the like 70% that did in 2020. But

that's a significant mitigating factor, I think. I forgot that statistic. 70% of Americans cast their ballot before Election Day in 2020? Yeah, 72 to be precise. Yeah. Interesting. Have we said all there is to say about scandals? Does anyone have a stray thought about scandals? Nate, you must. Not about scandals. I would remind people that Georgia is a state

That has a runoff process. If no candidate gets 50% of the vote, then famous as we saw in 2020, races can go to runoffs. There is a libertarian candidate in the Georgia Senate race. And so, so yeah. So one question is like, does this, maybe Walker would have lost anyway by plurality, but he would have gotten enough of the vote to fend off or to go to a runoff.

And maybe now he won't, right? Or maybe now the polls are wrong and Warnock was going to avoid a runoff, but now he'll have one, right? Or I'm, yeah, sorry. Or Walker was going to have a runoff and now he, now he won't. I'm talking double negatives. Anyway, Georgia has runoffs. Always something to keep in mind about Georgia.

Yeah, you're not aiming to win a plurality. This is not a first-past-the-post election. You gotta win a majority or you gotta go to the runoff. And the runoff is gonna be earlier this year. It's gonna be in December. So I hope no one made plans for Thanksgiving. Sorry, folks. All right, well, let's leave things there. I should also mention something else that folks have to look forward to, which is our live show.

in Washington, D.C. on October 25th. We are already just about halfway sold out and we are three weeks away. So if you want to get your tickets, you want to make sure that you're there, then you should get a ticket now. And there's a link in the show notes. It's going to be a good time.

My dad's going to be there. My brother's going to be there. You can meet some more drukes. Nate, do you have anyone in town who's going to be there? Yeah, one friend maybe. Okay. All right. Folks can meet Nate's one friend. Not saying that you only have one friend, but the one friend that will be at the live show, right? I know, like, consistent with my brand of hitting on Washington, D.C., I don't have that many friends in D.C. It's weird. Vegas, Miami, California, Chicago.

Austin, Texas. Where do you have the most friends outside of New York? Either probably Austin or Miami or Vegas. That's pretty on brand. Yeah. What about you, Nathaniel? Or you live in D.C. So, okay, Nathaniel, you have lived, you've now spent time in Nate Silver's two least favorite cities, Boston and Washington, D.C. It's true. What do you have to say for those cities?

I mean, I love Boston to death. I'll defend Boston forever. I'm not sure I would defend DC as heartily. All right. Wow. And after that slander, Washingtonians, come see us live on October 25th. Yeah, come see us. I got offended by DC at the lack of jaywalking. Have we talked about this before? Interesting. Seven years on, there's nothing we haven't talked about before. Okay.

I remember going to D.C. and like I had a coworker from D.C. and like he didn't jaywalk even in Chicago where I lived at the time. And then no one in D.C. jaywalked. I mean, if you're not jaywalking, then it's not my kind of place. That's interesting, Nate. That's true. I wonder if it's because it's like D.C. is like, you know, it's like obviously it's part of the Northeast to sell a corridor thing, but it's also got its little kind of Southern influence. And I wonder if they're too polite over there, because as a Bostonian, I'm a proud jaywalker, but.

What's the jaywalking-est place in America? New York. Boston. It's not Philadelphia? What are you talking about? I'm sure Philly jaywalks plenty, but like New York is the jaywalking capital of the Americas. That's probably true, actually. There are a lot of people with death wishes there. But Boston, I mean, like in Boston, like the streets don't make sense. The crosswalks are like a mile apart. You got no choice. You got to do it.

The most important message that we wanted to get across here is that folks should come join us at 6th and I in Washington, D.C. on October 25th. And I think we're going to incorporate some Washington, D.C. specific content into the live show to just show you how much we do really actually love Washington, D.C. But that's it for now. So thank you, Nate and Nathaniel. Thank you. Thanks, Kalen.

My name is Galen Druk. Emily Vanesky is in the control room. 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. Thanks for listening and we'll see you soon.