Is Donald Trump The Inevitable GOP Nominee?
56:51 Share

You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad. Reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lipson Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a reproduced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Lipson Ads. Go to LipsonAds.com now. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N-Ads.com. What does G stand for?

George. George Elliot Morris. Yeah, I kind of thought this was common knowledge. He's named after George Elliot and yet doesn't spell it. I'm not named after George Elliot. That's the sad part. It's just a happy coincidence for my family.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. And also, welcome to official campaign season. Now that we're on the other side of Labor Day and summer plans and distractions are subsiding, as tradition goes, this is when focus on political campaigns really begins to heat up.

The elections this November, like a ballot measure on abortion in Ohio, will get some attention, but the main attraction is still the Republican presidential primary. So today, we're going to ask a fundamental question for the four months between now and the Iowa caucuses. Is Donald Trump's nomination inevitable? And if not inevitable, how can we place the likelihood that he wins the Republican primary in historical context?

Also, we have partial results from two special primary elections from Tuesday, one in a solidly red congressional seat in Utah and the other in a solidly blue congressional seat in Rhode Island. The races highlighted some of the internal divisions within the parties, and the winners are all but certain to head to Congress. And we also have a good or bad use of polling example on a classic and controversial topic

internal polls. So here with me to discuss it all is senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich. Welcome, Nathaniel. Hey, Galen. Welcome yourself. Welcome back to good old US of A. Why, thank you. I really appreciate that. I had a nice adjourn in

Hey, thanks for having me, Galen. Welcome to the podcast, Elliot.

Longtime listener, first time caller, as they say. I love to hear it. And also here with us is Leah Askeranam, who is filling in for politics reporter Kaylee Rogers while she's on maternity leave. So congratulations, Kaylee. And welcome, Leah, as well. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

We're excited to have you. And also apologies that the podcast is coming out a little late this week. As Nathaniel mentioned, I was away and really getting ready to head into campaign season, as I mentioned. So we're going to do that by diving in to our good or bad use of polling example. And this week, it comes courtesy of Politico. So over the weekend, they published an article titled, quote, the leaked internal poll numbers scrambling the GOP primary.

And they describe a situation where groups aligned with Trump, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy, or the campaigns themselves, are releasing internal poll results to media outlets that potentially inflate those candidates' standings in the race, or perhaps cherry-pick only positive data. The article reads...

Publicly released internal polling isn't new in politics. Campaigns have been releasing or leaking their internal numbers, most often as a tool to gin up fundraising, for decades. But in the increasingly nationalized 2024 GOP primary, campaigns and allied groups are using the tactic more aggressively than in prior races. So we have a cascading number of questions about good or bad uses of polling. And the first question is this.

Is leaking internal polls to media outlets a good or bad use of polling, Leah? Can I have a bit of a cop-out and say it's a fine use of polling with many caveats? Hmm. Okay. Well, whether or not we'll grant you that cop-out depends on what your caveats are.

Okay. So I personally like to see more numbers. So if it's internal polling, that still is helpful in getting situated in whatever the election that we're looking at is, in this case, the Republican primary. But like, you know, we were just looking at House elections. You know, we're just talking about the special election in Rhode Island and

You know, if you're not looking at internal polling there, you know, you could say that anybody is in first place, even if, you know, the actual numbers that ended up being in the polls weren't completely accurate. They at least told us, like, who was in the lead. Basically because in those House races, the only polls that are conducted are internal polls. Exactly. Unless it's like a super high profile one or you have amazingly well-funded local media outlet.

So I like having those numbers. I think it's the onus is on the reporter or the writer to textualize that and say, you know, like, this is what we can learn from these polls. It shows us who's in the game and who's not in the game. But don't use these numbers as, you know, your Bible. Like, this is not going to be a necessarily predictive poll, but it shows us, you know, like what we're dealing with. Well, in order to contextualize that, I feel like we have to have some sense of how

skewed those results might be? Because, okay, if we're using it to understand who's in the game and who's not in the game, but we also don't have much of a sense, like, do we have a sense of how skewed those might be based on, like, do we only consider leaked internal polls if they publish their methodology and the methodology looks up to par? Like, how should we contextualize that?

Well, I mean, historically, 538 has subtracted like five or six points from a partisan poll released by a campaign or some sort of partisan sponsor, right? In a horse race where you have a Democrat and a Republican. So I tend not to trust it. I mean...

I guess the question for me is like, what are we trying to do with the internal polling? If we're trying to put it in a model and adjust it and do all sorts of statistics, maybe it's useful. In a context where you're like reporting on it, I think some of these headlines are pretty misleading that we're getting from these partisan polling numbers. And then there's the added layer, which is like what we know about partisan campaign polling is usually about general elections.

In primary elections, they might be even less useful than we already know them to be, which is like pretty useless most of the time. Wait, okay. So we have some disagreement here. I think we have Leah with a good use of polling and Elliot with a bad use of polling with maybe caveats on both sides. Nathaniel, are you swayed more in one direction or the other?

Yeah, I mean, I'm with Leah. I think having more data is good. You just have to know what to do with it. And it's very dependent on the segment is like, it's good or bad use of polling, right? And so each individual media outlet can use an internal poll in either good or bad ways. And I agree with Elliot that like,

A lot of times, media outlets will report on internal polls uncritically, and they will put in the lead or in the headline or whatever that Donald Trump is in the lead or whatever. I mean, Donald Trump is in the lead, but that X candidate is surging based on that candidate's internal poll. And that is obviously not to be trusted. But as a reporter who I like to think is more skeptical, when I get an internal poll, I always ask myself, why is the campaign releasing this? They have to have an agenda, right? And like,

some of the things that you can look out for are like, sometimes an internal poll will like show that candidate head by like one point. And that to me is like, they're clearly angling for like a headline of like so-and-so candidate leads. But as Elliot mentioned, like historically, like we've done studies that have shown that

internal polls tend to overestimate the candidate who sponsors them by like four or five percentage points. So actually, I would look at that poll and say, actually, like this person, like, you know, maybe they're in the race, but they are probably behind and they are trying to convince people that they are not by releasing this poll. Similarly, if you have an internal poll where the candidate is like within striking distance and they're like,

two or three points behind, it's like, okay, you're definitely not leaving this race. Then if the best you can come up with is a poll that shows you trailing by two or three points, because it is important to remember that these polls are what they want you to see. They are probably the best case scenario, you know, for every internal poll that gets released, there are probably three or four that don't get released. And as people know, when you take a poll, you know, you can get different samples and some of those samples will be more favorable to you. Others will be less favorable.

But those pollsters can selectively release the polls that are better for them. Can we clarify just for a second here what an internal poll is? Because I think that's important.

Are campaigns straight up making up numbers out of whole cloth? Or are they waiting the same survey in different ways to try to get different results? Or are they conducting a bunch of different surveys and only releasing the results that they find favorable to them? Like, how do we end up at a place where these are on average skewed between four and six points in a candidate's favor?

Usually we don't know. We don't know the process that's generating the data that those internal polls are coming from. Whether or not the campaign is releasing the polling numbers themselves, or the pollster is leaking the poll to a media outlet for attention for the polling firm, or what have you, we don't know the processes, typically, that those internal polls are being made under. So that's another reason that I'm pretty skeptical of this stuff, but...

law of averages, right? Usually it's going to be helpful for us. Usually you should put it as an input into a model, but I think the usability of the data pretty much end at the input into statistical model line. I think that's right. I'd also, these professional pollsters who are working with some of the better funded campaigns, these private, basically contractors don't want to look stupid, right?

at the end of the election because they want to get more clients. We've seen what happens when a campaign releases just completely messed up numbers. That pollster becomes kind of a butt of the joke internally in our nerdy world.

So it is helpful to know who the pollster is. All internal pollsters are not the same. Technically, you can get anybody to poll your risk. But as reporters and writers, we should be pretty selective and at least explain, like, this is a polling firm that has some credibility that's been around for years, or this is a polling firm that does not have any credibility. We've never heard of them, and they also don't show methodology. Right.

Just like a case-by-case basis. Yeah, a lot of these pollsters are quite excellent pollsters and they do have great reputations within their party. And as Leah mentioned, that's why they kind of keep getting hired and hired. And I do think that in a lot of cases, the data they are providing to their clients is good, but we don't get to see all of that data. Like I said, I do think it's a combination, Galen, of the three options that you said. I don't think it is typically that they are just making up numbers. That's obviously a very, it would be a very serious kind of

But I do think that they're like, you know, I think there's definitely some like selectiveness in the polls that they have.

that they release. I think there are things you can do in terms of like waiting and maybe, you know, you turn up the, you know, and like the number of like voters who are favorable to you and you assume like a favorable turnout environment to you, your candidate, for example, which isn't like necessarily wrong. It's just like a best case scenario. And I think, again, behind the scenes, probably a lot of these pollsters are talking to the campaigns being like, this is the best case scenario for you. Here's a worst case scenario that maybe we won't release publicly.

And then there are also things like asking the question, like, you know, sometimes you'll ask like an informed ballot question. Will there be like, you know, so-and-so candidate like, you know, we'll bring jobs to America and, you know, we'll stand up to Russia and China, whereas other candidate like, you know, is mired in this scandal. Who are you going to vote for? And those polls are obviously like borderline useless. Ideally, they would ask somebody.

kind of the clean horse race question before they they ask that and then you can kind of see how the movement goes and that can be useful for campaigns because that um can maybe show them a path forward in terms of messaging um but for us as analysts like obviously those kind of biased um question wording um isn't useful and that's also an important thing i also do think we need to caveat that like it is important especially it's important for all polls but especially for internal polls that we have all of the relevant information

Because if we don't know the question wording of an internal poll, certainly if we don't know the pollster, if we don't know, you know, things like the sample size or the dates of the poll, that is incomplete information that could be being withheld purposefully to obscure the fact that this poll is actually even less useful than we already maybe thought that it was. Can I just add a wrinkle here about media criticism? Always.

Clearly, internal pollsters and campaigns have caught on to the fact that, like, there's a lot of news to be written. And in an election season, there's going to be a lot of articles that are simply reporting on a single poll. I think we are having a really good conversation about best practices for using internal polling data. But, like, clearly, there's a pretty small circle of people who are doing this the right way.

And it's incumbent, obviously, on reporters, if we're making a criticism angle, for them to do their reporting job the right way. But it's also probably wise now for readers to be asking themselves not just the standard methodological questions about a poll, but like, what is the campaign's incentive for giving this media outlet their poll? You'll see in lots of this reporting that a reporter will write, you know, X report.

X outlet obtained this polling data. And that really just seems like a nice way of them saying, this campaign sent us a poll so we could write a story about it. And then you really need to start questioning whether or not this is like reflecting the reality of public opinion. Okay, so I want to start going point by point here so we can say what is a good use of polling and what is a bad use of polling. Conducting internal polls, good use.

releasing internal polls, also good use. Putting them in an average, good use. Is that correct? We're all on the same page that putting them in an average is a good use? With the correct adjustments, yeah. With the correct, like with house effects adjustments and knowing who the pollster is and everything that goes along with that. Okay, so putting them in an average, good use. Publishing a single article based on a leaked article

internal poll. Getting the sense that we're going to fall on the side of bad use. I mean, unless your headline is campaign releases internal poll to show that they're still in the game with 12%, but actually 12% isn't enough to win. But that's not going to get very many clicks.

So in my like, I would I would read it. But the way we're doing it, not a great use. Okay, so generally no, but there's like there is a world when SEO is completely irrelevant where you could

potentially devise a good use of polling. So my next question here is, is Politico's assessment that this is a growing trend, a good or bad use of polling? There seems to be an assertion here that like this has become a big thing in the Republican primary and

And absent this article, it wouldn't have crossed my mind, honestly. And it seems to be a pretty common practice. It seems to have been a pretty common practice for a long time prior to this. Is there any reason to believe that this is becoming a bigger deal? Because I'll say from observing...

trends in the Republican primary polling over the past half year, whatever's happening doesn't seem to be working. Whatever internal polls are being released on behalf of DeSantis or Trump or even Ramaswamy doesn't seem to be making much of a difference in terms of how they're actually performing.

Yeah, it's like a news story for hyperactive news consumers, right? Not the news story for the average Republican voter. I don't know if the reporters from Politico or elsewhere want to know, like, are there more partisan surveys released now than there were in the past? Like, come ask us. We can run those numbers for you. But there's always been...

a drive for candidates to get media attention in a primary. That's like the biggest thing that they need to gain votes and get momentum to the extent we think that exists. And that's for a separate podcast.

Maybe they're using polling data, internal polling data more now to get that news attention. I would buy that. But I guess I don't know if it's necessarily a good or bad use of polling. They did run a couple numbers and they made the comparison that back in 2012 from August until Labor Day.

There were about 10 nonpartisan pollsters who released survey results and that this August there were only one, two, three, four that did the same. They didn't actually count the number of internal polls leaked.

But they do say, they do talk about us. They say, in fact, the five most recent Iowa polls in FiveThirtyEight's database were commissioned by Republican groups, including the Super PAC backing Trump's campaign and the pro-DeSantis nonprofit. So it seems like they are suggesting that this is becoming a bigger trend and it's maybe becoming a problem. Are we worried about it?

I mean, look, we'd always prefer, I think we can all agree, we'd always prefer independent polls to partisan or internal polls. Yeah.

they are, I think, you know, kind of going back to Leah's point at the beginning, like to understand certain races, they are a necessary evil, but I would rather have different types of polls. I haven't crunched the numbers ourselves to kind of compare, you know, the cycle to 2012 or whatever, but, um, you know, Steve Shepard, the guy at Politico who wrote this, you know, he's a, uh, a good analyst. And so I have no reason to doubt his conclusions that it's, that it's on the rise. And, you know, yes, I, yes, I would agree that that is, you know, not an ideal development, but I also think it's one that we can handle, um,

And it's also not like a four alarm fire considering the fact that everybody agrees that Donald Trump is significantly ahead no matter which way you slice it. Right. I was going to say that might be another reason we're getting fewer polls. Yeah. Well, I think though,

I think the risk is that, I mean, we've been looking at, you know, internal polls for down ballot races for a while. I don't, I don't, I haven't noticed an increase in those. There's not usually a ton of media attention in smaller races. But in that world, it's a pretty small world of people who are not writing about

tons of headlines who are basically using this information to get a sense of what the house races look like rather than trying to keep people updated day to day, kind of like feed the machine on some random house race. So now that we're seeing them on kind of a more national level,

presidential level, I do think there is a risk of the media or, I mean, analysts or just people in general reading them as is. But it's already, I mean, that's already a big problem in the way we read polls, right? Like that people just see the number from one particular poll and they say, well, that wasn't the election result, so the poll was wrong. You can't expect that we're

what an internal poll tells you is going to be actually predictive of the outcome. And we have to separate the two. So I actually think it's an interesting point that Steve brought up in the article that like, we're going to have to figure this out how to communicate this to

readers and people who are anxious about the election. All right. Well, that sounds like a good place to leave things. We have some good uses of polling. We have some bad uses of polling. And I have a feeling that this is a topic that we will come back to in the coming months as this primary unfolds and as we get into the general as well.

But speaking of polling in the Republican primary, let's move on to the state of that primary and the inevitability of a Trump nomination.

You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad. Reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lipson Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a reproduced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Lipson Ads. Go to LipsonAds.com now. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N-Ads.com.

You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad. Reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lipson Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a reproduced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Lipson Ads. Go to LipsonAds.com now. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N-Ads.com.

According to our Republican presidential primary polling averages, nationally, Trump has 52% support today on September 6th, Wednesday. DeSantis has 15% support. Ramaswamy has 8% support. Haley has 6%. Pence has 5%. And everyone else is in the low single digits.

Since the debate, we saw Trump's numbers dip a little, a couple points, and then revert a little as well. Ramaswamy's gains leveled off and declined a little bit. DeSantis saw no movement whatsoever. And Haley increased her support by two or three points.

Overall, after the first big focusing event of the Republican primary, ultimately not so much has changed. And so as we enter the fall with monthly debates, a deluge of candidate interviews and ads and campaign stops, is this race actually even competitive? So to kick things off, Elliot, you tried to assign odds to the likelihood that Trump would actually win this thing. What did you find?

Yeah, I think the framing here, I might change it a little bit, not to totally prod you, Galen. Come at me. Come at me, boy. For me, the question I want to know, when I'm drawing a polling average and it's like six months before an election, what I want to know is, historically, how much have the polls changed between now and that election in the next six months? And what's the other uncertainty in the polls that might cause them to be wrong? We've been talking a lot about the latter with this

purported increase in partisan polling entering the averages. But the former is a little more predictable historically. Might be a bit of a better guide for people if they're asking like how...

how instructive our national polls at helping us predict who the winner of the eventual, you know, majority of convention delegates is going to be. Okay. So what did you conclude? That's a good lead. So if you do that, if you run our polling average for every primary going back to 1972, and you take every candidate's polling average today, or when this was written, which was late August, and you predict...

how likely they are to win the actual nomination, not like just Iowa or New Hampshire, but the eventual nomination for their party, then you get a probability for Trump somewhere around the like 80 percentage-ish range. But there's lots of caveats. So I don't want people to like run with that. And the caveats are an important part of the story here for how much we can rely on the polling data. Caveat number one, we don't have a whole lot of polling data. We

We especially don't have a lot of polling data with candidates polling at 50% or better. There's four other candidates in our historical data set who have polled at 50% or better in August. Three of them won. The loser is Ted Kennedy in 1980. So maybe you start there and you say, okay, Trump has a 75% chance.

That might be a useful heuristic, but there's a lot of other considerations you have to make for how useful this polling data is going to be. And that's not necessarily something we can model. And that's like, is Trump going to drop out because of particular events from this campaign? Maybe his four indictments matter. The polling data just can't tell us that. Or on the other hand, are polls more reliable when...

a former president is running for their party's nomination again after being defeated, I could be persuaded either way. So I don't know. That's a little wishy-washy for people. I think what like the important thing here is that polls today don't indicate that Trump is an inevitable nominee nationally or in many states and that there's a real opening for someone else. I don't

I don't see who it could be, but theoretically there's an opening for someone else to win the party nomination. Yeah. I mean, so you mentioned that number, approximately 80%. You also in the process of going, you know, trying to find the odds that Trump will win the nomination came to the conclusion that they fall, you know, broadly speaking somewhere between 54% and 93%, right? Like,

based on the things that you said, like that we have a limited historical sample in order to derive these from, that we have limited amounts of polling. I mean, make sense of those numbers in layperson speak. Like there's between a 50 and a 90-something percent chance that Trump will be the nominee. Like how should we make sense of that as people who

just observe politics and care who wins the Republican nomination. Or maybe don't care who wins the Republican nomination. Yeah, the thing is, right, when you have a small sample size to make a prediction from,

You can imagine a lot of new data you might get from competitive nominations in the past, from candidates who just did a little bit better or worse than expected. And you have to take that uncertainty into account in your model if you want to make a good prediction or if you want to be clear about the limits of your prediction.

So in this case, because there's like only four candidates or depending on if you want to count Ted Kennedy three that have pulled around Trump's neighborhood for polling numbers in the past. There's just a whole lot we don't know about how candidacies like Trump's current one behave. Are we really saying that this just isn't predictable? I'm saying that.

It's predictable. Well, I mean, yeah, maybe. I don't know. It's not that it's not predictable. It's that there's limits to the prediction, right? People can interpret that however they want. Massive limits to the prediction. Okay. No, but I think that's right. And primaries are really weird processes. There is a very limited number of them historically. It's a small sample size to look at. I totally agree with Elliot that it is a useful heuristic. But like,

We also have not experienced, this is something we'd love to run thousands of simulations on and we only have a couple of dozen.

Because for folks following or not as nerdy as us, the modern primary system began in the 70s. And so while we may have been electing presidents for hundreds of years, we don't actually have hundreds of years of data in terms of competitive party primaries, just to put that out there. And you can listen to the 538 audio series, The Primaries Project, from Galen Drew to find out about that. Indeed you can, Nathaniel. Thank you for the show. I appreciate that. Yeah.

But, but yeah, and then like the fact that kind of what Elliot also alluded to is that there are things that are unmodelable in this like primaries are also driven by elites in a way that like general elections like general elections like are on the track, they are hurtling toward November 1st.

whatever. And like, you know, there's not much you can do to stop them, but like parties can, you know, can kind of like interfere and, you know, try to put pressure on, on voters in different ways. And, you know, like we saw in the 2020 democratic presidential primary, the coordination between like Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg endorsing like Biden, um,

and kind of coalescing around that, like that's something that you can't predict historically or kind of mathematically. And so it makes it hard. That said, all of that said, I do think that like all of the evidence strong points to Donald Trump as at least a favorite, if not a strong favorite. And I think that is the takeaway. Like at this point, like would I be surprised if Trump loses? Yes, because, you know, things with a 20% chance, they do happen sometimes, but they're rare, right?

But I think... A 20% to 50% chance. That's true. No, isn't it a 10% to 50% chance? Isn't it like a 7% to 47% chance? But I do think... I mean, this is where I'm going to go into pundit land. I do think it is closer to the 93% than it is to the 54%. And I think that Elliot's 80% number makes a lot of sense. Okay.

Leah, jump in here. You know, I totally agree with that. I mean, it's hard because it feels like Trump has locked it up, right? Like if you look at

The just like the debates, if you look at the national polling, like it looked like who else could possibly who else could could end up in first places. But when we look state by state, you know, like Trump has not locked down Iowa or New Hampshire yet either. And when I say lockdown, I mean, we haven't seen, you know, a dozen polls in a row showing him with more than 50 percent last time I checked.

And so until he's like really has a firm position in those two states, there's so much volatility and everything that can happen afterward. So if Trump, you know, great night in Iowa, but then, oh my gosh, like Tim Scott gets like 70%, that's not going to happen. But like 70% in New Hampshire, not going to happen. I'm just using this as an example, right?

then the primary is different, then everything changes. It's not decided on a national popular vote, but also the sequence of the states matters and a lot can change once voters actually go out to the polls, which is why it's probably frustrating to hear us say, you know, like, well, we can't say Trump definitely has a lockdown.

Because like who else would? But like the numbers just aren't there. And that doesn't mean that, you know, if we look at Trump's past, I just have a feeling that he's going to be the nominee. I think that like, I think 80%, I think that sounds right.

But we can't – I can't responsibly say he's got to lock down. Yeah, my next question was going to be where does the uncertainty come from? And so we've listed a couple forms of uncertainty here already, which is one, the polling. The polls could be wildly, massively, incredibly off. We've also named just volatility in terms of primaries in general.

And also the sequential nature of primaries. We're looking at national polling when in reality it's the state by state by state succession that matters. Are there any other sources of uncertainty here that we want to – I mean we've also mentioned the indictments and the ahistorical nature of that.

Anything else we want to shout out here as a form of uncertainty that's important for assessing the next four months? Well, there's also a lot of candidates. So you get more uncertainty or volatility historically when you have a lot of candidates in races. It's harder for people to make decisions between 20 people than it is between two people. So you get a lot of vote changing, especially on the 1% to 5% range for candidates.

Um, and that means that like maybe Vivek Ramaswamy two weeks ago, it looks like the guy who might be able to beat Trump because of his trend line in the polls being positive. But if he has a bad debate performance, but also a bad performance in even one state down the line that could like doom him, people could decide, Oh, he's not our best shot at beating Biden or whatever it would be. And that would cost them to change their votes. So yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of candidates. That's another source. Yeah. We're in kind of a weird place, like in the primary process where, um,

We've been operating under the assumption, or some people have been operating under the assumption for a while that Ron DeSantis was going to be kind of the alternative. And even in polling that showed him, you know, 30 points behind Trump, he was still regularly placing second. He was the alternative.

And I think we're just hitting this point where there's more agreement that he isn't necessarily that alternative candidate. And so we're just seeing who's going to rise as second candidate. And once we...

Once we see, first off, if one manifests, I think we'll get a little bit more clarity. We're not going to be able to make a major declaration like Trump is the nominee, but there will just be fewer paths to deal with and fewer kind of outcomes. And, you know, from there we can kind of limit the options. Right. If somebody doesn't start polling in the 20% plus range, right?

then Trump's inevitability seems clearer is kind of what you're saying there. Yeah, I think it's partly if nobody gets to the 20% range, but also...

I mean, it's really more about Trump getting to the 50% mark more than it's about another candidate getting to the 20% mark. You know, once we have enough voters saying, like, we are going with Trump and, like, at that point it becomes a persuasion campaign against Trump. It's not just, like, you know, other candidates trying to attract his support. Right.

then we can get a little bit more clarity. And Elliot, so you mentioned that there were four candidates that have historically pulled above 50% in August. Ted Kennedy, of course, running against Jimmy Carter in 1980 was the one who did not ultimately end up winning his primary. But the other three just to be completionist here were Al Gore in 2000, Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Bob Dole in 1996, who all ended up winning their primary.

You did another process as well, which is to sort of look at the odds of candidates like DeSantis or Ramaswamy or Haley winning. And for each of those individual candidates, you know, combined, as we mentioned, it's somewhere between 7 and 47 percent or something like that, their odds. Individually, like how would you rate, say, DeSantis or Haley's chance of winning the Republican nomination? Yeah.

Yeah, well, if you just use the same predictive model that we were using for Trump, and instead of making a prediction for someone around 50% of the vote, which is what he's at today, I think he's at 52 now, you make a prediction for someone at 10 or 15% of the vote, that would be for Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis, respectively, then you get odds for them just north of the single digits, like 1 in 10 chance that they would win the nomination.

The other candidates polling less than that are even longer shots, like one in 20 chances. But the big takeaway I think here is that we're kind of in uncharted territory with the guy at the top of the ticket. So these probabilities...

also might be underrating candidates' chances. If you repeat that same uncertainty in the uncertainty, right? Uncertainty around the probability exercise from earlier, then maybe Rhonda Sanders has a 20 or 25% chance of winning, depending on how much uncertainty you want to try to model. And that, I think, kind of gets us back to the starting point, which is like,

This primary looks over if you just look at the national polls, but if you consider movement and volatility, if you consider that the outcomes of the actual elections that we're going to get to have next year, right? Like those are actually going to get to happen. We're really in the punditry land still right now. Then you can imagine scenarios where some of the

sort of candidates in a race for second place might be able to come out on top. They're still far-fetched, but they are mathematically there.

All right. Well, as I often say on this podcast, we will just have to wait and see. We already had one dropout, of course, while I was away. Francis Suarez dropped out. We will see who's next. Maybe we will even host a dropout draft on this podcast to try to predict who will be the next candidate to drop out. We'll just have to wait and see. But before we wrap up, let's talk about those special elections that I mentioned.

You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad. Reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lipson Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a reproduced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Lipson Ads. Go to LipsonAds.com now. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N-Ads.com.

There were special election primaries in Utah and Rhode Island on Tuesday that had no shortage of drama and pit intra-party factions against each other. So in the solidly blue Rhode Island 1st Congressional District, the more moderate Democrat Gabriel Amo won with 33% of the vote against a Bernie Sanders and Our Revolution-endorsed

progressive. In the solidly red Utah 2nd District, there hasn't been a call yet, but more moderate Republican candidate Becky Edwards has 36% of the vote, and more conservative Celeste Malloy has 38%, with 80% of the votes counted. All right, to begin, without maybe mentioning every single candidate who ran in this primary, because the list, I think 12 people were running in this primary, but there were some points of

high drama and in both of these races, almost to like a ridiculous extent. So what were the dynamics that went down in Rhode Island, Leah? So we knew that there are going to be a ton of candidates. The eventual winner would win with a plurality of the vote. And actually, Amo won with a higher percentage than I was expecting. I thought it might be like 21, 22%. And you know, I think last I checked, there were still a few votes left to be counted. But we were at like a third of the vote.

So Amo ran on Biden's coattails. And he literally, I mentioned this in an article I wrote, there's literally a, like an Instagram post or a Twitter post where he shows himself like eating an ice cream cone and is like, I'm Joe Biden.

I'm sorry. I'm Gabe Amo. Like, basically, he worked for the Biden administration. He worked for the Obama administration and bet that there was a significant block of voters that would find that appealing, even though nationally Biden's approval rating is in the low 40s.

And that ended up working out. So the big kind of surprise, or I don't know if you could really call it a surprise because any outcome would have been okay, because like we said, we didn't have a lot of polling and what we did have was internal polling.

But national support had come in for Aaron Regenberg, who was a progressive with support from Bernie Sanders, AOC. And in the end, he placed second. So there was a higher portion, it looks like, of support.

the Biden vote than the Bernie Sanders vote in this particular Rhode Island district. But again, we're talking 33% versus 24%. So it's not a huge difference. What we will see is Biden has an ally in Congress, a new member. Amo should not make Biden's life more difficult, which is probably welcome given the incredibly narrow majority Republicans have.

So, yeah. And I should mention it was a primary. He still has to win in the general election in November, but it's an incredibly Democratic seat. I'd be shocked, shocked if a Republican won the general election.

Yeah, and this race, I think, was characterized more by some kind of bonkers scandals than by ideological divisions, which I think, you know, did surface particularly with Regenberg being kind of so prominently endorsed by national progressives. Although there was actually, there were some local progressives who didn't really like him, which may have been an interesting subtext.

But the initial frontrunner in this race was the Lieutenant Governor Sabina Matos. But it was revealed that her campaign submitted forged signatures in order to get on the ballot. She did end up getting on the ballot, but a massive number of her signatures were disqualified. And she was not seen to have handled that scandal particularly well.

You know, it seems like, you know, it was like there's not evidence that she herself coordinated this scheme to get on the ballot. It seems like it was just kind of her like campaign staffers who who allegedly forged these signatures. But she took a couple of days to respond to it. It really seemed to sap her popularity among Democrats in the district. And then there was also another candidate, actually the top fundraiser in the race, who

um who had to drop out like a week before the primary because uh local news revealed that he had while teaching at williams college as a professor um he had made romantic overtures to a student um and so that really kind of you know the both the candidate with the highest name recognition and the candidate with the most money both basically you know like became non-factors toward the end of the race um which contributed to kind of how volatile and um

and kind of unpredictable it was at the end. Can we make conclusions here? Should we make conclusions here about the appeal of the different paths for the Democratic Party at this point? Obviously, one being the more progressive and one being the more moderate establishment. Meh, I would say. I think like,

Again, like the winner won with such a with a plurality with 33 percent. So it's hard to say like, well, this is the overwhelmingly popular position. I will say that Biden supporters, including Ron Klain, Biden's former White House chief of staff who endorsed Biden.

took to Twitter and was like, this is evidence that Biden's really popular. And we saw TJ Duckloaf, I think, tweet something like, I'm a Biden-Amo Democrat or something.

So I think there's definitely a bit of a PR machine trying to make that. But I mean, it was a relatively higher turnout election than we might have expected. But it was a special election the week after school starts in Rhode Island. And there were so many, like Nathaniel mentioned, personal weird scandals throughout the six weeks of this campaign that it's hard to draw real conclusions about the national environment. Yeah, that...

boosterism of Biden based off of Amo's win seems to me to be like a bad use of election results.

I mean, we just don't have enough real evidence. Like, consider the source, right? That that's a trend in American politics today. I mean, Biden is popular with Democrats, sure. There are just better data points you can point to if you want to say that, like, establishment Democrats perform better in elections than progressive Democrats do.

At this point, although, you know, it's an interesting point about how many candidates there were in this race and how ultimately the winner got a plurality. I've got 33% of the vote. So 66% of the vote went to somebody else. But we've talked about this in the past. When, you know, jurisdictions implement ranked choice voting, it rarely changes the outcome of the election. Right.

Does this seem like the kind of environment where rank choice voting might have changed outcomes? Interesting question. I'm going to say no, because most of the time when rank choice voting changes the outcome, the two candidates are like separated by like a couple of percentage points. And this was what, like nine points. So like, that's a decent spread. Like it's hard for rank choice voting to make up that difference. Um,

But, you know, I think it would have been interesting because I think maybe it would have changed the nature of the campaign. And, you know, there were definitely some candidates who received a negligible amount of support who probably would have tended toward one of the front runners rather than the other. So I would have liked to have seen kind of the counterfactual. But at the end of the day, I'm not surprised at all.

I feel like Amo, because he probably was not offensive to any group within the Democratic Party, probably would have been able to get a majority. I do think ranked choice voting would have made a difference in the Utah race in a clear way. Well, dive in, Nathaniel. Take it away. All right. Utah. Utah.

Utah. So there's also a primary on Tuesday night, or on Tuesday, the results came in on Tuesday night, in Utah's second congressional district, which is a deep red seat being vacated by Representative Chris Stewart.

There were three Republicans. Well, okay, so there was a convention where a bunch of Republicans ran. Then a bunch of Republicans did not qualify for the convention because only one candidate could get out of the convention. That was Celeste Malloy, who is a staffer for Stewart. Two other candidates got on the ballot by submitting signatures, but then, Galen, you alluded to the drama in both races.

This race had drama because it ended up that, like, Malloy hadn't voted in Utah in two elections and, like, hadn't been a registered voter. And, like, was she even eligible to run? And they ended up ultimately basically being, like...

eh, what's done is done. The convention nominated her, so we're going to go with it. So that was kind of interesting. But the three candidates who ended up getting on the ballot basically consisted of two kind of, you know, normal conservative, you know, pro-Trump Republicans. And

One candidate, Becky Edwards, who actually voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and admitted that publicly, although she did say she regretted her vote. But she was definitely the more moderate option. You know, she, you know, as mentioned, has worked against, is an anti-Trump Republican, has encouraged people in 2020 not to vote for Trump and basically warned the Republican Party about going down that path.

Currently, the staffer to the current representative, Celeste Malloy, is leading Edwards, the anti-Trump Republican, 38% to 36%. So it's very close. And there are still some number of mail ballots. We don't know exactly how many, but at least several thousand left to count.

um so this could still go either way but that third candidate who was also kind of a pro-trump uh and kind of down the line republican got 26 in the vote and i do think in a ranked choice voting scenario like the overwhelming majority of his vote would have gone to celeste molloy and not edwards the anti-trumper and clearly would have given maloya a win it's still possible that maloy will win in the end anyway um but

But this is a good example, I think, of like, you know, like an anti-Trump Republican can still win a primary when the pro-Trump vote is split up. And like that may be the only path. What is the nature of the district, though? I know that Utah has a uniquely anti-Trump streak within its Republican Party as well. Like how much does that play into this?

Yeah. So the district is, uh, like all the districts in Utah, it's got a slice of urban Salt Lake city area, and then it stretches into the rural areas. And if you look at the map of the results, uh, Edwards, the anti-Trumper, um, did really well in the urban areas and Salt Lake city, kind of the more educated parts of the district. And then all the rural counties were very pro Celeste Malloy, um,

And so, you know, there was a very strong divide there. And really that's going to end up deciding this race is like, are there more votes remaining in like the Salt Lake City metro area or in the rural counties? Yeah, it's kind of wild how this Republican primary turned into a little bit of an urban rally.

rural divide question. That's, I mean, there was always a chance of this. And Celeste Malloy did run on being, you know, the representative for Southern Utah. That was kind of her pitch at the convention, you know, not from Salt Lake or not from Park City, where I believe Bruce Huff, the third candidate we mentioned in RNC committee is from. And so it was kind of a, you know, almost a populist-ish message, though I will say that

Even though, you know, Malloy and Huff support Trump, they did not really. Well, for most of the campaign, Huff didn't want to talk about him until recently. Malloy, to the very end, really didn't want to talk about him. He's not going to have.

whatever happens between Edwards and Malloy, I don't think Trump is going to have like a rabble rouse as a supporter. They all told a local radio station they won't join the Freedom Caucus. I think McCarthy probably is going to end up with at least a friendly face. That's a good point. None of these candidates was like Marjorie Taylor Greene. They weren't like, you know, the like when

When you think about full-throated MAGA, they were just kind of like, yeah, Trump is a great president and I support him type of Republican, kind of like McCarthy. All right. Well, it sounds like these primaries are very, very, very likely to decide who heads to Washington. Yeah.

but when we look at other before we wrap up here general election special elections you know where we're actually pitting a republican against a democrat have we seen any trends so far this year in how the two parties are performing in special elections yeah so um we haven't had many congressional special elections but we have had a lot of state legislative special elections and democrats have been doing really well in those um

They have overperformed partisan lean by an average of 10 percentage points, according to my calculations, which are very similar to the numbers that we saw in like 2017 and 2018 when Democrats were really energized under the beginning, the first few years of Trump. And it is notable, I think, that this is happening under Biden and whether that's because of kind of continued Democratic enthusiasm and outrage after the Dobbs decision, whether Trump's kind of

looming presence for 2024 is, is getting them motivated. I don't know, but, um, that, that is one of the better signs for Democrats in a year when so far the like, you know, polling of, uh, you know, kind of general elections does not indicate, you know, that Biden or Democrats have some gigantic lead. So that's kind of an interesting puzzle. Um, but special elections have been historically predictive on average, um,

of kind of the eventual national popular vote. So that's something we'll be watching closely. Also, obviously, we'll be watching to see these general elections for the Rhode Island and the Utah districts to see if those exhibit the same types of overperformance for Democrats. There's another explanation, too, with the specials, I think, which is that the type of person that votes in special elections now tends to be more Democratic than they would have been five years ago or a decade ago. And that's because...

A person's education in American politics today is predictive both of how often they turn out to vote and of how supportive they are of Democrats. So if you go from having this pool of like highly engaged, educated voters that are voting in special elections like 10 years ago that were relatively split between Democrats and Republicans and then that same group gets more Democratic over time, they'll just like

It'll seem like the national political environment is good for Democrats based on that metric, but really it's just a selection into the electorate for these types of contests. So that's another force here. I don't think it explains all of it. I'm not saying that. I just think it's another thing for people to consider. Yeah, I'm not persuaded by that personally because before the Dobbs decision in 2022, we did see Republican overperformance in special elections. Right.

Not by a ton, but by a little bit. And that is just very different from what we're seeing right now. And I don't think that educational polarization has gotten that much worse in the last year. Yeah, I think there could be other effects on this group that makes them more democratic since Dobbs. Certainly, I think Dobbs made a difference. So you'd expect to see at least a little bit of a change.

All right. Well, this is definitely a trend that we'll continue tracking as we – what elections are we looking out for actually this fall? Obviously, we'll have some general elections in November. Any elections that anyone wants, we're not going to talk about them now. We're not going to preview them. We don't have time. But if you want to shout out an election or two that you will be watching this fall, what should we look out for? Yeah.

i'm going to be watching a special election in the new hampshire state house on september 19th this is a republican held seat but the democrats have a good shot at flipping it especially if they continue the overperformance they have been exhibiting in special elections and this is important because the new hampshire state house is extremely closely divided

And in fact, if Democrats flip this seat and then also win another special election in a safely blue seat later on in the year, they will tie Republicans in the New Hampshire State House and effectively end full Republican control of the state. That said, the New Hampshire State House is famously large and chaotic. It has 400 members. Sounds like previewing to me, Nathaniel. Okay, fine.

But anyway, it's going to be a really interesting race. And then, yes, there's all that normal stuff in Kentucky and Louisiana and Ohio and stuff. And there's state and local elections in Virginia, where I am too, which...

could decide the future of Youngkin's agenda, depending on how things shake out. So that's not a preview, Galen. That's just me saying there are stakes to the contest, but not a preview. How dare we make Louisiana a throwaway reference at the end of all of that, Nathaniel? It's a, I mean. You're right. I'm sorry. I, I,

you're forgiven ish. Um, no, I, I, I have some, I used to live in, in new Orleans. Um, I'm watching that race. Uh, even though it's probably not the most, uh, eventful of the three, but it's Louisiana politics. You got to watch it. You never know what's going to happen. And that's a term limited democratic governor of a very red state. So, uh,

We will be watching that as well. But thank you, Leah, Elliot, and Nathaniel for joining me today. This was a great discussion. Thank you, Galen. Thanks. This was fun. It's my pleasure. My name is Galen Druk. Cameron Tretavian is in the control room along with Tony Chow, who's also on video editing. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet us with any questions or comments.

If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.