How Data Became A Political Football
40:57 Share

This episode is brought to you by MeUndies. Underwear drawers are like the Wild West. You never know what you're going to pull out or what shape it's in.

So upgrade your collection with the buttery soft comfort of MeUndies. MeUndies signature fabric is as soft as a warm hug from your favorite sweater. Plus, it's breathable and oh so comfy, making it ideal for all-day wear. Get 20% off your first order, plus free shipping at MeUndies.com slash Spotify with code SPOTIFY. That's MeUndies.com slash SPOTIFY. Code SPOTIFY.

Baseball players are not that hot. Like if we are ranking sports based on hotness of the players, it goes number one, rugby, number two, crew, number three, tennis, number four, football,

Number five, like soccer, cattle. All those guys are models. Sorry. Soccer, rugby, crew, tennis, football. Then it's like jujitsu, like that Australian break dancer from the Olympics, luge players, chess players, and then baseball players.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. How about that game last night? It's like I always say, when your past protection is breaking down, facing nothing but rush four, you have to reassess your ground game. I'm literally always saying that. I have no idea what I'm saying right now. Anyway, last night was, of course, the Super Bowl, one of the rare events in American life when just about everyone stops and pays attention. And we have such little monoculture left.

the state of sports betting. After that, it's the mysterious case of the missing government data. Over the past few weeks, government websites and data sets have gone offline without explanation. That includes data from the CDC and the Census Bureau.

some data sources that we've used over the past nine years on this very podcast to keep you informed. So what is missing and why? Finally, we'll ask, what remains of the pre-Trump Republican Party? And one possible answer to that question is 41%, to be precise. That's how much of the current population of congressional Republicans were there before Trump took office in 2017. In other words, most Republicans in Congress got there during the Trump era.

We're going to dig into the numbers behind what's changed and what it might tell us about Trump 2.0. And here with me to do that is senior elections analyst Jeffrey Skelly. Welcome to the podcast, Jeffrey. Good morning, Galen. And yes, if you can't run the ball and the Eagles are getting to your quarterback rushing just four people, you're

It's going to be a tough night for you, which is what happened to the Chiefs. I know that's literally what I'm always saying. Thank you for backing me up on that. Also with us is senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rekic, one of the podcast Nathaniel fellow football ignoramus. Thank you, Galen. Yes, I've I learned everything I know about football from you. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. We're in trouble.

But I'm assuming you all watched, right? Because like I said, it's the Mon. I watched. I appreciated the Martha Stewart Skechers advertisement. I did not. You did not? Appreciate that. But I did watch. It was a little off-putting, but so was so many things. A little off-putting?

That's so ageist. Martha Stewart can enjoy a little shuffle. I mean, the CGI version of her, sure. Yeah, I mean, there you go. Okay, so in case you didn't hear, the Eagles beat the Chiefs 40-22 to win Super Bowl 59. And...

We live in a time where things may feel hopelessly divided into partisan camps, and that extends to the media we consume. But the Super Bowl draws the attention of all types. In fact, a YouGov poll from last week found that 48% of Americans said they would definitely or probably watch the Super Bowl.

That includes 53% of Kamala Harris voters and 53% of Trump voters. And amongst both groups, Harris and Trump voters alike, a larger share said they were rooting for the Eagles than the Chiefs. The vast plurality, though, 49%, said they didn't care who wins. So say it with me. We are the 49%.

Here at the podcast, we wanted to get in on some of the fun of the big game. So we did what a lot of people do or increasingly people do. We made some prop bets. In case you don't know, a prop bet is like a side bet on something small that may or may not affect the outcome of a game. So our prop bets were cooked up by a friend of the show, Dylan, aka producer Shane's brother. Thank you, Dylan. And they include propositions like who will win the coin toss? Which team will score first? And why?

Will Travis Kelsey propose to Taylor Swift after the game? Oh, did he? I missed that. No, I mean, you don't lose by that much and then propose to your girlfriend. Good point. Come on.

Where's the romantic Nathaniel? I do not currently know the results, but as I am speaking, Cameron, our producer, is going to pass me an envelope and reveal the winner for the first time. We have, there were 23 total bets. In third place with eight correct answers is Nathaniel. He picked the Chiefs to win and Patrick Mahomes to win MVP. That did not happen. Sorry, Nathaniel.

In second place, with 12 correct answers, we have Jeff. He correctly predicted the Eagles would win. This is about to be very, very funny.

I assume that means that I won. Yes, here we go. Cameron says, the winner who predicted the game winner and the Super Bowl MVP, the only panelist to do that with a whopping 17 out of 23 correct bets is Galen Drew. Wow. Galen also beat all 10 people in the wider pool of Shane's brother's friends who also like football. Oh my God. Congratulations. Okay, so is this where I do the acceptance speech? Yes.

Um, I did not know which teams were even playing in the Super Bowl until maybe I filled out this Google donk with all of the prop bets. I did it completely randomly. And thank you. Have we learned anything about the betting markets or prop bets from this exercise?

Well, I think so. My strategy is I also filled them out, not randomly, but with that with no actual knowledge. And yet I finished last. So I filled it out. I picked the first option for everything. An important point here, because we talk about polls on this podcast. And I think that.

Sometimes, as we've talked about, like online polls can be suspect because sometimes people's eyes will glaze over if they're being asked about things they don't know about and being forced to have an opinion on them. They might just kind of click things at random. And it doesn't necessarily mean that 20 percent of Gen Z or whatever knows how to operate a nuclear submarine, which is kind of surprising.

the famous study that the Pew Research Center put out a year or two ago. So it is interesting, though, that Galen did much better with his random guessing than I did with mine. So I don't know. I smell a rat here. I, you know, I'm not so sure. I want to recount here. OK, well, you're right to smell a little bit of a rat. It wasn't fully...

random for me, I thought I was hedging my bets. Like I was saying, I think there's going to be a lot of them were about how many points would be scored by a certain point in the game. And I thought I was like going to be like overall, I'll say that there's going to be a lot of point scoring in the game. But each quarter, I'm going to say that there's not all that much point scoring. So I was like, I'm not going to get last one. I'm probably not going to get first.

So in the process of hedging my bets, I guess I didn't actually really hedge my bets very well, but I accept first place nonetheless. Jeffrey, the actual football fan on the podcast, I feel like you have more to account for here. Well, I think it just speaks to the fact that some of these prop bets were, you know, is heads going to win or tails going to win? I mean, come on. That doesn't actually indicate any kind of knowledge base. Now, I will say, I believe, if I recall correctly, that I...

answered that someone besides Jalen Hurts, Patrick Mahomes, and Saquon Barkley, I think might have been one of the other options, would win Super Bowl MVP. But essentially, that was me taking the field of potential others. And since many times in the past, there's been some random defensive back who had two interceptions or something and has won the Super Bowl MVP, I felt like that was the higher probability bet. Obviously, it didn't pay out in the end, but...

So I actually went through and thought about them. Yes, yes. The ones like that I actually did think about. I was like, oh, what's the over-under? And then, you know, what's the, you know... I actually think I even looked up a couple stats on defense. But anyway, I ended up getting like half of them. So there you go. I felt like my strongest bet was on the Gatorade color that would be dumped on the head coach. Like...

obviously it was going to be yellow, right? Come on. I mean, what other Gatorades are? I mean, there are lots of other Gatorades, but, oh, and apparently I was the only one who won that in the entire pool. The other thing I would like to ask here is who actually won MVP? I don't remember who I picked. For that one, I genuinely picked a random name. Jalen Hurts won in real life, so I don't know. Oh, maybe I picked because it's like Jalen Galen. I was like, oh, I like that name. Oh, yeah, there you go.

All right, so the point of all of this is not that sometimes you get lucky. It's more that sports betting is becoming a growing part of American life. So a survey conducted in December from NerdWallet and the Harris Poll found that 20% of Americans had bet on sports in the previous year. That's up from 12% in the same poll conducted a year earlier. A significant increase, 12 to 20%.

And while it seems like American vices in general are in decline, so people are drinking less, they're smoking less, they're getting on Ozempic and presumably eating less, they're having less sex, but more and more people are gambling. So what is what's going on here, Jeffrey? Well, I mean, I think there are probably a number of potential explanations, but I do think if you're talking about the things that might be contributing to why we're seeing, I don't know,

Less vice in other realms. You know, people are staring at their phones or their tablets and whatnot. And guess what's really easy to do on your phone or tablet if you have the app downloaded? Gamble on sports or gamble on anything, really. So it's so easy now to get into it.

But just anecdotally, I have lots of friends who do this. I mean, luckily, I think all of them have managed to keep it pretty tame in terms of what they're gambling, but in terms of amounts. But nonetheless, it's like...

It's so simple to do. It gives you a little buy-in for every game that you're watching or whatever you decide to sort of put some interest into. And as someone who actually enjoys looking at the lines and over-under and whatnot, I actually find that information to be really interesting and at times helpful when I think about things like, who am I going to start in my fantasy football league? But I have so far not taken the plunge into that.

She actually gambling on this stuff because even the prop bet thing showed, even if you think, you know, a fair bit, sometimes it doesn't pan out and, you know, you can take a bad beat or many more than one. I assume that also part of this has to do with sports betting becoming increasingly legal across the country. So it's illegal in some form or another in thirty nine states plus D.C.,

And, you know, I think probably part of the reason that we're seeing it legalized in more and more states is because of the profit...

proposition for these states. So more than a dozen states report an excess of a billion dollars in new tax revenue. Other states, it's an excess of hundreds of millions of dollars. But this is not, like many vices, cost free. So according to one study that has not been peer reviewed, it found that 28% increase in bankruptcies in states that have legalized sports betting compared to ones that have not.

Other research suggests states with legalized sports betting have seen increased rates of credit card debt and lower savings. I don't want to be a scold here. I'm not against vices. I use them. But Nathaniel, what should we make of this whole dynamic?

Yeah, it's mostly because of the Supreme Court's decision in 2018 that basically allowed states to legalize sports betting and the leagues in particular, which have historically been very leery of gambling, baseball being kind of the obvious example with its history of scandals with gambling. So the Black Sox in 1919, who threw the World Series because they were being paid to do that by people who were betting on it.

And then you had Pete Rose, of course, who gambled on baseball games and was banned permanently from the game as a result of that. But yeah, you have now...

The leagues are realizing that these are big moneymakers for them and they're embracing them and they're putting a lot of support into legalizing sports betting in states. So there have been several ballot measures that have legalized sports betting, including the one there was the kind of OG one is in 2011 in New Jersey, which is

the one that kind of went all the way up to the Supreme Court to decide, like, can they do this? And then when the Supreme Court was like, yep, every other state was like, cool, let's do this too. Not every other state, but most states, as you mentioned. There's a lot of money being spent on these. Obviously, there are a lot of companies like FanDuel and those types of companies that have a lot of money to be made and things like that. So in

Missouri that just legalized sports betting at the ballot box in 2024. There was over $45 million spent to pass that initiative. There was only $14 million on the other side. So yeah, this is a big financial driver for people.

Yeah, and just a couple more data points before we move on. The average sports better in that Harris poll that I mentioned earlier spent more than 3000 in the past year on gambling. About one in seven of those better said they have gone into debt to gamble. And then 40% of betters report having made net gains in the prior year. So you do the math, that's less than half.

But, you know, I guess I'm just here to say, know the data before you play. Or actually, sometimes maybe you don't need to know the data before you play and you should just make a wild guess and maybe it will go just fine. I really should have put some money on that. Shane offered to me to put money on my prop bets and I said, no, I have no idea what I'm doing. But that was a mistake.

I would just point out that a good strategy does not always lead to good results and a bad strategy does not always lead to bad results, as Caitlin discovered. All right. Important life lessons on a Monday morning. Let's move on and talk about that missing government data. But first, a break.

Today's podcast is brought to you by Shopify. So it's a new year, 2025, and you're thinking, how am I going to make this year different? How am I going to build something for myself? I'm dying to be my own boss or see if I can turn this business idea I've been kicking around into a reality, but I don't know how to make it happen.

Shopify is how you're going to make it happen. And let me tell you how. The best time to start your new business is right now. Shopify makes it simple to create your brand, open for business, and get your first sale. Get your store up and running easily with thousands of customizable templates, no coding or design skills required. All you need to do is drag and drop. They're powerful social media tools that you connect all your channels and create shoppable posts and help you sell everywhere people scroll. With Shopify, your first sale is closer than you think.

Established in 2025 has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash 538. That's the numbers, not the letters. Go to shopify.com slash 538 to start selling with Shopify today. Shopify.com slash 538. Save on Cox Internet when you add Cox Mobile and get fiber-powered internet at home and unbeatable 5G reliability on the go.

So whether you're playing a game at home. Yes, go. Or attending one live. Go. You can do more without spending more. Learn how to save at Cox.com slash internet. Cox Internet is connected to the premises via coaxial cable. Cox Mobile runs on the network with unbeatable 5G reliability as measured by UCLA LLC in the U.S. to H2023. Results may vary, not an endorsement of the restrictions apply.

As you probably know, dear listeners, here at FiveThirtyEight we are data nerds by trade. So one development that caught our eye in the first few weeks of Trump's second administration was the loss or offlining of large sets of government data.

To give you a timeline, on Trump's first day in office, he issued executive orders recognizing only two genders and rolling back DEI initiatives within the federal government. More specifically, the Office of Personnel Management received orders to, quote, "...withdraw any final or pending documents, directives, orders, regulations, materials, forms, communications, statements, and plans that inculcate or promote gender ideology."

By January 31st, government data sets were going down from sites like the CDC, Census Bureau, and Data.gov, and online archivists were scrambling to figure out what exactly had gone missing. By Sunday, two days later, some landing pages started to come back with a warning message that read, quote, CDC's website is being modified to comply with President Trump's executive orders."

I should say here, we still don't know exactly what's missing, what's not, what's temporary or long term and exactly why. But Jeff, you are in the process of digging into all of this to help illuminate it. So as far as we know today, what data has gone missing? Well, you know, in the initial sort of response when things were going down, you know, for instance, there was a

from the American Community Survey, which is basically the census's estimates of population change, makeup of different areas, whether you're talking about congressional districts or counties or even towns. That's an example. What data in particular? Was it like racial or ethnic data or gender data? Like what was miss... Was it all just missing? Yeah. So specifically in this particular case with the American Community Survey, it was more...

which is to say a lot of that larger, uh,

extremely in the weeds data sort of by census block getting down to, you know, if you're trying to understand like the makeup of an area became more difficult to do that just because that file was not, you couldn't download it. Now I will say, so there was that, there were things like, it was like a youth risk behavior survey that I know got a lot of notice from the CDC because it was

At one point, it started asking actually a question about whether young people identified as trans. Just a couple of years ago, it started asking that question. So I think that, of course, raised a lot of flags for people because we're thinking about the executive order that Trump put out and obviously the debates over gender and transgender identification. So I think really what it is, is there was this initial like, whoa, what is happening here? Like things were going offline.

And then what has happened over the last few days is that a lot of those data sets and a lot of websites seem to have come back. Not all of them necessarily, but a lot of them have. So I was actually doing a little math on this. So based on sort of the Wayback Machine, which I'll plug is a very handy tool, there were 307,854 data sets, I should say, on data.gov as of January 20th.

And then that fell down to about 305,470 on the 22nd. So two days later. So you're losing about 2,400 data sets. And now that has ticked back up to 307,322 as of this morning.

So that means that overall, you're down about a net 532 data sets. Now, I haven't identified which of those 532 are missing or have not come back online yet, but I think it does speak to the fact that

This so far looks like a blip more than anything in this one isolated situation. However, I do think there are larger concerns about sort of in the long term. And obviously, this is all data that already existed. It's not new data. And it doesn't say something about what might happen to data collection going forward. I want to talk about that piece in just a second. But first, why should we care? Like, who's using all of this data from data.gov?

How does it impact us? Yeah. So I think it's easy for people to be like, oh, it's just like a bunch of like pointy headed academics or, you know, journalists writing about something that are just ticked off that I can't download that Excel file from the Census Bureau of like, I don't know, percentage of the population that is not Hispanic, white in every county in the United States or something. But it's actually a much bigger deal than that in the sense that if you think about just the wider use of government data, like

It is used by just all kind of all areas of either the nonprofit or for-profit sectors. You know, for instance, if you think about if you were running a, you know, say like an electric car company, right?

Obviously, that's a reference to one Elon Musk and what's been going on with Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency. It's like if you were running a high-tech firm, you might be interested in government reports on auto sales, consumer credit, energy prices, unemployment, and employment. But the point is that not just pointy-headed academics are using this data, it's like

you know, the company down the street from you might be using it, you know? Well, yeah, it's as simple as like, where should I open or close a franchise of my business? Like, am I going to build a new Applebee's in a place that's like bleeding population? Probably not. Okay. So I think though, we're going to keep tracking this and see,

if or when all of the data sets come back online. But I think this whole exercise got people's sort of senses alerted because

Also, the government is responsible for collecting a lot of data, and it's important that a lot of this data be, one, collected rigorously, two, not tampered with by partisan actors, and then three, trusted by the broader public when it does come out. So one of the hallmarks of

you know, our American democracy is that when our agencies put out information like the unemployment rate or the inflation rate, we trust that the executive branch has not gone and said, no, no, no, no, no. I don't like that inflation rate. Report something else. No, no, no, no, no. I don't like that unemployment rate. Report something else. So this is an interesting

And let's be real here. It's not just the journalists who care about this information. It's the people who basically run the markets, right? Like every time Chinese economic data comes out, everyone's like, okay, fantastic Beijing. Now let's talk to some people who've actually been studying this stuff because we can't trust any of their governmental data.

So do we have any reason to expect that this could things could get hairy when it comes to government data collection over the next four years? Yeah, I think this is where context is important, because this is obviously happening amid the start of a new administration. Donald Trump, who has not exactly been shy about promoting various conspiracy theories or having someone like Elon Musk talking about how we need to, you know, kind of

unwind a lot of bureaucracy and in part going into all these different government agencies and potentially affecting their ability to do their work by, you know, people being laid off or people be, you know, it remains to be seen like how this is going to affect how a lot of government agencies work, many of which produce some of these reports and potentially, you know, it hasn't necessarily come up yet that Doge has gone into some

like the Bureau of Labor Statistics or something, but to your point about like the trustworthiness of this data and the belief that it is rigorous and transparent,

That getting called into question could have sort of a long – you know, sort of longer tail impact on the many different sectors of the economy and government use this information to try to make good decisions, whether for profit or nonprofit, for the public or for the bottom line.

And so I think that's the real thing is like, is this sort of going to have a chilling effect to some degree on people using that information with confidence? Do we have reason to potentially fear that there could be some messing with the data, you know, or, you know, being finicky with it? I mean, for instance, you know, I do think back to the the episode with Donald Trump and Hurricane Dorian in September of 2019.

Which, I mean, you know, if we're going to, you know, sort of be think about this information, you know, it was like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Noah kind of went back on. It was like Trump. Trump basically drew a line where he said this hurricane was going to go. It didn't really align with the data that Noah had.

And then Noah put out like an unsigned follow up statement that basically said, well, actually, what Donald Trump said wasn't necessarily wrong. This is obviously when Trump in his first term said.

And it got a whole lot of pushback and it turned out that – from some New York Times reporting that essentially the commerce secretary had put pressure on NOAA to change – sort of put out a statement to try to make this kind of all work out. And to me, that's the thing. It's like do you have people who have a partisan interest in pushing certain narratives about what the information should show or what they want it to show?

And that actually impacting how it's produced, how it's published, what is published. And so that's the big fear. And that's for data going forward. And that's the thing. It's like we can preserve the data that's there, but what's going to happen with data going forward? Yeah. And I'll also point out that even if the data comes back online and it's accurate and it's

you know, trustworthy and all that, it doesn't necessarily mean that Americans are going to trust the data, right? So we obviously know that we're in this era of low trust in institutions, and that includes the government. So for example, according to the Pew Research Center, only 22% of Americans say they would trust the government to do what is right, uh,

always or most of the time. And that's down from kind of the halcyon days of the 1960s when that number was in the 70s. So we're already in this era of crisis in trust in government and

taking data down without an explanation and then maybe putting it back up. It's a vicious cycle, right, where it contributes to the sense of polarization and partisanship that has really taken hold. And, you know, even if the data is accurate,

if people don't believe that it is, that causes its own issues. And in recent years, Democrats have been more likely to trust in kind of data and official sources than Republicans have been. But because Trump is the one in office right now, and we know that trust in the government tends to decline among the party that is out of power, maybe that damages some of the last remaining people who really do trust this data. So I think that's also a huge concern. It's worth noting, actually, also, just to remember, like,

Again, to the whole point of like who cares about this data and what the source of it is, this is taxpayer funded. These are government agencies funded by the taxpayer.

gathering information that is then used by the public. So that I think is also worth remembering when we talk about this. And so if taxpayers are paying for this information and the information becomes less reliable or less trustworthy, it's a waste of tax dollars in a way. But the information's obviously got all kinds of importance to understanding what's going on in the country, another important aspect. All important points. And for that reason, we will stay on this story. But let's

Let's move on and talk about Republican turnover after this break.

One of the themes that's defined at the start of Trump's second term is his attempts to take more power for the executive branch. This is something we've talked about on the podcast. And in particular, that includes the power of the purse, which we generally understand to be assigned to Congress. And so in all of this, you may be wondering, where is Congress? How have they been responding?

More to the point, where are congressional Republicans who might be willing to criticize Trump? And the answer is that a lot of them are no longer in office. So on the day that Trump took office for the first time, there were 293 Republican members of the House and Senate. 293. Very few were products of Trump's first presidential campaign. Obviously, almost all of them had to win within a Republican Party apparatus that existed before Trump.

Now, eight years later, of those 293 Republican members of Congress who rose in the pre-Trump era, just 121 are left on Capitol Hill. So that's 41% of the original almost 300. The other 59%, roughly three in five, are gone. And the Republicans in office today had largely to win primaries in the Trump era.

Nathaniel, you have been looking into this Republican turnover. What does it tell us about the dynamics amongst Republicans today in Washington? The story is, you know, it's just putting numbers on something that I think a lot of us kind of knew just by watching the dynamics in Washington, which is that Trump has basically fully taken over the Republican Party. Right. And that I think it is instructive to know that the Republican Party is not

kind of this calcified entity that is unchanging. It is made up of people and those people are constantly flowing in and out. And one of the many definitions of what the Republican Party is, is it's kind of membership in Congress. And to what Galen just described, more than half of the old Republican Party that was there at the beginning of Trump is now gone and it has been replaced. And so there's lots of good data in the article to this point. But the roughly, you know,

like three-fifths of Congress that is new under the Trump era are people who have run for office either while Trump was president or while he was out of office, but returning, you know, everybody knew he was trying to return to the White House and the party had become Trumpier in character. So about three-fifths of Republicans in Congress today ran under that environment, knowing that that was kind of what they were signing up for. And then the remaining, you know, two-fifths

have stuck around, obviously, not all of those people probably are true believers in the, you know, the Trump mission. But there are at least people who have kind of learned to navigate and they are more conservative by a DW nominate, which is one of the kind of canonical measures of partisanship than the three fifths of people who left. So, you know, obviously,

Obviously, this is not unique necessarily to the Trump era that there's going to be turnover over the span of eight years. But how does it compare to past eight-year periods in American politics? Right, exactly. It's important to note that obviously people retire from Congress all the time. People just get old. People decide to go run for other office. Sometimes people will resign because of a scandal that has nothing to do with kind of their ideology.

You know, sometimes people pass away. But the amount of turnover that happened, at least while Trump was in office, was unusually high. So Ballotpedia collects data on basically the House turnover during each president's first term. And they found that 47 percent of Republicans who were there at Trump's first term, and this is just the House, my data was House and Senate,

But 47 percent of House Republicans who were there in Trump's first term were not there at the end of his term. And in the past, that number has been somewhere like in the 30s. So, for example, for Jimmy Carter was 29 percent. For Ronald Reagan, it was 34 percent. For H.W. Bush, it was 30 percent. For Bill Clinton, it was 40 percent.

For George W. Bush, it was 23%. And this is all for members of their own party, of course. So that level of turnover is particularly high, whether that's because of a lot of the dysfunction that has been in Congress or because the party's kind of definition on what is meant to be a conservative has changed. We see this in polling as well. Dan Hopkins, an academic at the University of Pennsylvania, has written for FiveThirtyEight about how

When you ask voters their definition of conservative, it basically now basically means pro-Trump as opposed to kind of what it used to mean, which is small government, that sort of thing. A three-legged stool. Exactly right. So for whatever reason, the data does bear out the fact that this is an unusual amount of turnover. And so the identity of the Republican Party has changed faster than the identity of parties have changed in the past.

I think this kind of transformation comes to mind when we think about the relative ease with which Trump has gotten his cabinet nominees confirmed. I think there was some skepticism amongst people who report on Washington, but also in the betting markets that folks like RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard would ultimately make it through the confirmation process. I mean, do you think they would have made it through eight years ago? Is this one of the sort of

Yeah, I do think so. I was one of those people. You know, I was skeptical that RFK or Gabbard specifically would make it through, as I think I said on the podcast. And, you know, while it's not official yet, you have had kind of some of these purges.

prominent Republican senators who are left, who are would perhaps have some sign in their past that they would be willing to stand up for Trump. People like Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who voted to impeach Trump back in 2021. He voted to advance RFK out of committee. People like Susan Collins, the, of course, moderate senator from Maine who has voted against Trump in the past.

She has said that she's going to support Tulsi Gabbard's nomination, which, you know, if Susan Collins is voting for her, she's probably going to get confirmed as well. And, you know, it's harder in the Senate, I think, because a lot of it is, you know, it comes down to like specific personalities and also it's like the margin. Right. So Republicans have a relatively comfortable margin right now of 53 Republican senators, although I think actually

when Trump first took office, it was the same, right? It was 52 or 53. We got accustomed to narrower margins under Biden. But yeah, you know, you had John McCain in the Senate when Donald Trump first took office. You had Jeff Flake,

And more recently, kind of Mitt Romney was elected in 2018, but only served one term and, of course, was kind of a traditional anti-Trump Republican. But now that list is short. And even, you know, I think the two people who are really on the top of people's minds, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins. Collins, at least, hasn't shown any indication that she is going to stand in the way. Of course, she's up for reelection in 2026, which may have something to do with that decision as well. Yeah, I mean, who...

should we be looking at as the Trump skeptics of the Trump second term? I mean, you mentioned, obviously, folks who would have been skeptical in his first term. I know that Mitch McConnell, sort of now that he's out of leadership, has expressed some skepticism. He obviously didn't vote for Pete Hagseth for secretary of defense. Are there other folks who

who we should be looking at as part of the

41% that stuck around and may still not be happy about the state of the Republican Party? Yeah, I think, you know, I mentioned Bill Cassidy. I think Todd Young of Indiana is someone who declined to endorse Trump in the 2024 election. And he is also one of those people who is he's been around in Republican politics for a long time. He was first elected a senator in 2016. And before that, he served, I think, six or six years in the House.

So he's definitely more of a traditionalist, but again, has has so far gotten behind Trump's cabinet nominees. One kind of person who cuts against this pattern is John Curtis, the senator from Utah who succeeded Mitt Romney.

Utah obviously is a little bit different. The strain of republicanism there is heavily influenced by the state's Mormon population, which has traditionally been anti-Trump and John Curtis is considered more of a moderate as well. But running for Senate or continuing to run for Congress every two years, knowing that this is the party of Trump now, I think indicates, again, at least kind of a willingness to go along with Trumpism to advance. Maybe he is still looking to advance conservative

traditional conservative goals, small government, etc. At this point, you know that you are going to have to contend with Trumpism while you do that. And that does mean protecting yourself, for example, against a Republican primary challenge or just generally Trump's wrath. Utah is unique in one more way, which is that it is one of the very few states left with a ban on sports betting to bring it all full circle back to the beginning.

And with that, we're going to end this podcast. So thank you, Jeffrey and Nathaniel, for joining me today on this Monday after the big game day. Thanks, Galen. Thanks as always, Galen. My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Tretavian. You can get in touch by emailing us at galen.druk at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.

♪