Our 2024 Superlatives
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We're going to make a yearbook and we're doing superlatives. Yes. Cue St. Elmo's fire. This is a teensploitation podcast a la John Hughes.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk, and we love measuring things here at FiveThirtyEight. So how do you measure a year? By the way, yes, we have nearly made it to the end of this one. So happy holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy New Year, all of the above. If you work at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, maybe you measure it in 12 months worth of inflation data. So 2.7% increase in prices.

If you're interested in elections, maybe it's that a record-breaking 4 billion people lived in countries that held elections this year, more than half of the world's population. If you're an incumbent, maybe you measure it in that for the first time in over 100 years of data, every governing party in a developed country lost vote share 100%. And in the U.S., it was the third time in a row the incumbent party was booted from the White House.

If you work at the DCCC, maybe you measure it in the number of votes that separated you from your House minority and House majority, which is less than 7,500 votes across three districts out of 155 million votes cast.

And of course, if you're a fan of Rent, you've certainly debated measuring it in minutes, 525,600 of them, versus measuring it in seasons of love. Personally, dear listeners, I choose seasons of love. Heart emoji to all of you who have joined us throughout this topsy-turvy year. In case you haven't noticed, that's become my favorite way of describing this year.

In any case, today we are going to take stock of the year 2024 in politics. And to do that, we're going to make a yearbook. Raise your hand if you worked on your high school yearbook. I feel like there's some... Yes, I see you, Ruth. I knew there was going to be some high school yearbook energy on this podcast. Not only did I work on it, I was in charge of the superlatives. So you have chosen the perfect person for this podcast. Yeah.

And just to be clear, we did not know that before we asked you to come on today, but I'm feeling like the stars are aligning. You already said it, Ruth. We're going to be awarding superlatives. So think most likely to succeed, best dressed, most likely to get arrested. Here to do that, you already heard her voice, is polling editor at the New York Times, Ruth Egelnik. Welcome to the podcast, Ruth. Thank you for having me. I'm unreasonably excited.

Also here with us is senior researcher Mary Radcliffe. Welcome to the podcast, Mary. Good morning, Galen. Okay, I have to start off by asking, what, if any, superlatives did the two of you win in your own high school yearbooks? So I went to the largest public high school in America. And I went to the largest public high school in the United States.

My graduating class was like 1,500 people. So I was very invisible. Aw, shucks. Well, maybe we'll get you a superlative today. On purpose. On purpose.

On the other hand, I went to a very small public high school. My graduating class was 200 people, so I think everybody got a superlative. But I am proud to say that I got best hair. Oh my goodness, that's a really good one. I'm a little bit embarrassed to share what mine were. And yes, I won two. Two? Senior year, I got best dance moves.

Yes, 100% best dance moves and most likely to get arrested. Is there a story behind that?

There wasn't at the time, but now there is. Well, apparently next time I'm in New York, we have to go dancing. And get arrested. And get arrested, yeah. Well, I'm going to skip that second part probably, hopefully. Were those superlatives fulfilled? We'll never know. But in any case, let's get to work on our yearbook. So the producers have come up with a bunch of superlatives along with

three nominees for each, and we are all going to decide who wins the superlative. And of course, if you have some suggestions that were overlooked in the nominating process, we will hear you out. Yes, please use data where applicable, but also we are here to have a good time. So let's begin. Are you ready? Have we gathered around the yearbook office? And are we ready to make some decisions? Let's do it.

So first is for most stubborn. And the nominees are inflation, polls habit of underestimating Donald Trump or Joe Biden. Oh, I know my answer to this one. OK, Ruth, go. It's Joe Biden. Yeah, OK. I think that's right. OK.

You know, I mean, polling showed over and over, over many months that Americans thought that Joe Biden was too old. This wasn't a new piece of information. It wasn't new after the debate when people saw how he performed in the debate. And yet it took quite a while to respond to how most Americans were feeling about this.

Well, then let me ask you the obvious follow-up question, which is, had Biden decided not to run for re-election after the 2022 midterms and there was an open primary, do you think that Democrats would have actually been in a better position to win the election? You know, I mean, it's really hard to think about these hypotheticals. I can't tell you how often I tell reporters. It's hard to ask voters about hypotheticals. People have trouble...

understanding what might have happened. So it's hard to know. I can't say anything with authority. We as a country put a lot of faith in the open process of primaries. And I think there's something to be said for allowing the voters to decide and think through what Democratic voters would have wanted for their party instead of having that decision made for them. I don't know if it would have made a difference. It's really hard to know. I mean, as we know, based on the result, the headwinds were against Democrats and for Republicans.

Trump gets a lot of like credit for this victory. It was not a landslide victory. It was a very narrow victory. And you could imagine the wind blowing a slightly different direction and having a different result. So I think it could have happened. Yeah, I think the other benefit to having a primary is it gives the party the opportunity to hone in on the issues that actually matter to voters because different candidates will come with different issues to put on the table and voters get the opportunity to choose the approach that they think will work.

be most beneficial for the election, that they agree with most on policy. One of the things I was thinking about early in this cycle was how lopsided the media environment felt while the Republicans were running their sort of like fake primary, because we were just

constantly inundated with Republican ideas about policy. And I think that's maybe to the Democrats' disadvantage. And also to address some of the other nominees, inflation did fall notably. Obviously, as we've talked about on this podcast, Americans' understanding of inflation does not reset at the beginning of every year. And so despite the fact that inflation is now, you know, a little over two and a half percent annualized, Americans were still frustrated about it.

And in terms of polls habit of underestimating Donald Trump, they didn't get right on the money, but they got pretty freaking close. So Joe Biden, you win most stubborn for the 2024 538 yearbook. Moving on to most improved. The first nominee is waiting by recalled vote. This one's for you, Ruth.

The second nominee is Republicans Margins Amongst Latino Voters. And the third nominee is The Polls. Ooh. Hmm. Yeah, this is good, isn't it? I...

I think I'm going to have to go with the polls writ large on this one. I was debating about Republicans margins with Latino voters, but I think the reason that I'm going to say the polls instead is it's not clear to me the extent to which that improved margin among Latino voters is sticky. Is this a fluke or a trend?

I don't know that that's quite clear. It's certainly not a total fluke, right? I mean, it's capping off three cycles of trends. We saw movement among Latino voters towards Republicans in the 2022 midterms as well. But I think the way that we see differences between the top of the ticket and down ballot makes me a little unsure of like how much that's going to stick around as time goes forward.

But the polls did great. I was, you know, this year, I don't know what people could have wanted from the polls that they didn't get. All of the, like, major trends in the electorate were sort of foreshadowed in the pre-election polling if you were careful about what you were looking at and how you were thinking about it. So, like, this was really a banner year for polls, even with Trump on the ballot. So I was really happy. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's generally right. I mean, I think, you know, there is a good argument for waiting by recalled vote and take the bait on it, which is to say, right, people who did that were largely sort of vindicated.

Their polls were not inaccurate, just like all the polls. And so I think, you know, I have some hesitation was that I mean, talk about was it a fluke versus was it a trend? Like, is it possible that because this year the election was so close that, you know, waiting by recalled vote, part of what it does is sort of pushes it back to the 2020 and kind of close margin.

did this election just kind of happen to be the right election for that kind of practice? I think it's going to take some time for us to untangle that. But I do think people who waited by recall vote, like there was improvement. They felt validated, vindicated, like this actually worked out for them. I do think, though, I'm going to agree with Mary on the polls, partially because I think

There's the polls and the polls reputation, but the reputation of the polls has been pretty harmed by the past few election cycles. And so I think everybody was ready to count us out again. And you heard a lot of people, particularly Democrats, this cycle saying, don't trust the polls, just, you know, keep going, don't trust the polls, they're going to be wrong. And I think it was a really nice moment to feel like that wasn't true. Polls weren't totally wrong. Even if there are still some areas for improvement, you know, we don't want to declare things fixed.

But I think that improvement is nice and hopefully gives the polls a reputation boost and hope for the future that people will trust them again. Well, certainly they'll get a reputation boost now that everyone knows they have been awarded most improved by the 538 yearbook.

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Moving on to Most Creative. The nominees are the Pew Research Center for asking opt-in online panelists whether they had a nuclear submarine license, the AP Votecast for polling voters on dog and cat ownership this year, or YouGov for using the scientific method to determine that 1989 was Taylor Swift's best album. Ha ha ha!

Was there a vote difference in dog and cat owners? There sure was, Mary. Cat owners were more Democratic and dog owners were more Republican. Okay.

You know, can I give this doubly to the Pew Research Center? And not just because they are my former employer, but because I do think the submarine experiment was both funny and also a really helpful illustration of some of the challenges that we face with subgroups and non-probability polls. For folks who are not quite as online and politically engaged as we are, can we just explain, Ruth, what exactly the nominee is? Yes.

Yes. So people who've been listening to the podcast know that there's a difference between probability-based polls and non-probability-based polls. And in particular, when we talk about these non-probability polls, we often talk about online opt-in panels, you know, some of the names you've heard before, like YouGov, Morning Consult, some of these polls.

There's always been a concern with some of these online opt-in polls that there are either bogus respondents, they're not real people, or people are just giving answers to get an incentive and moving through it very quickly. And so there are often these kind of attention questions, and Pew asked an attention question about whether you had a

a nuclear class submarine license, right? So almost no people in America are licensed to operate a nuclear class submarine. And yet when they did this poll, particularly when they looked at young voters and Latino voters, it was something like a quarter to a fifth of people said that they had a nuclear class submarine license, which is impossible. And it was demonstrating that, you know, some of these results, particularly for subgroups like young voters and Latino voters,

shouldn't necessarily be trusted and i thought that was really creative and smart and also created a lot of fodder for us yes and i was gonna say i give it to them doubly because when i was at pew research center and apologies to the entire center for airing our laundry we secretly snuck a question about dogs and cats onto the poll and while we never published it pew did do that long ago so double credit for them wait and all the way back then before childless cat ladies and

all of the above, was there still a partisan divide between cat and dog owners? It was. The same partisan divide that Nork saw publicly, we saw privately in 2015. Oh. Oh.

All right. Mary, are you going to agree again and award the superlative to the same nominee as Ruth? Yeah, I think it's a clear standout among the nominees. Okay, so Pew Research Center, you win for most creative this year. Moving on, we're going to get a little more cute here, maybe a little too cute. Best bromance. The nominees are Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, Matt Gaetz and Kevin McCarthy. Gaetz and McCarthy broke up, though. It took me a minute to think that through, but...

I'm going to say Trump and Musk because one of the all-time best photos that I've seen is that photo of Elon Musk jumping in the background of a Trump rally. It really became this iconic photo. And I think a lot of voters noticed that. Yeah, and I think that's a good one for like possible future drama in later seasons, you know? Okay. All right. Best romance goes to Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Next, we are moving on to most popular

Which I hope no one ever got in high school. That's a little rude. The nominees are the double haters. The next nominee is the political downside of Trump's legal issues. And three, Ron DeSantis.

Can I suggest a fourth option here? Absolutely. I would like to suggest the impact of the Dobbs decision in the 2024 presidential election. That is a great one. Interesting. Okay. Go off.

There was all this speculation in the run up to the election. I mean, you can find think tanks and pollsters and op ed writers and all kinds of stuff. Political analysts. Yes. All kinds of people talking about how abortion was an increasing concern for voters in advance of the election. I actually found a piece, Ruth, that you wrote about this from the Times-Siena poll. And while it's true that you do see some increase in abortion,

Voters that say abortion is a top issue or the top issue

It's entirely, almost entirely driven by self-identified Democratic voters, which are probably just responding to cues from party elites. So all of this polling noise about abortion influencing the election really was, in a way, partisan sorting and not showing an improvement among the voters that Democrats needed to win in order to win the election. Yeah.

1,000% agree. And actually, you'll see a good piece from me after the election talking about how it was an overrated issue that got too much attention and people felt like it drove votes. So I completely agree. And I just want to add a couple points here. It does not mean that it didn't play an important role in 2022. And we talked about after those midterms, one, how just broadly speaking, midterm results are not predictive of the general presidential election.

that follows, and also that the electorate would look different. And actually, the New York Times did do some very interesting polling in this regard, which was looking at some of the lower propensity voters who did not show up in the 2022 midterms, what were the things that were most important to them. And it was clear that the economy was a much more important issue that broke through in a way that it did not for the smaller, more politically engaged midterm electorates.

So that's one thing that we already knew just starting after the midterms going into this election. And then the other thing is that Trump did work a fair bit to try to make people feel that the legality of abortion in their state would not be decided by this election.

So in the same way that Kamala Harris understood immigration to be a vulnerability for Democrats and did a lot of work to try to moderate the party's image on that, Trump did a fair deal of work trying to moderate the Republican Party's image on abortion.

Taking all of that together, we weren't totally blindsided by the role that abortion played in the end in the 2024 election. Yeah. And to me, like one of the most valuable data points here, and I may have talked about this on this podcast in the past, I know I've written about it a couple of times,

We asked how you feel about abortion as a four-point scale. You want it to be always legal, mostly legal, mostly illegal, or always illegal. And for the last year, so starting in November of 2023, Trump was winning that mostly legal group.

He's been winning that group all year long. So you have this massive group of people who want abortion to be mostly legal. And Trump has been winning that group even since before he was kind of wishy-washy on abortion. And I think, you know, I wrote about that in November of 2023. I wrote about it during the cycle. And I think it's a really valuable data point for people to like, it's hard to internalize

But it's important to understand that there's this big group of people who want abortion to be legal and want to support Donald Trump and that wanting abortion to be legal and being a Democrat are not necessarily synonymous. We've also been tracking that question since 2021 when Texas put their six week abortion ban into effect.

One of the things that we see is that's the only group that has grown since we started tracking this question is the people who want abortion to be mostly legal. And I think what's really important about that group is that when they say they want abortion to be mostly legal, what they are also saying is that they would support some restrictions on abortion, which is not the positioning that Democrats took in advance of the election.

Yeah. And one more thing going off of what Ruth said is you could see by looking at the polling. So there was a great example from NBC. There was a poll showing Trump and Harris completely tied nationally, 49 to 49 in the final month of the election.

But when you looked at the issues, you saw that Harris had like more than a 15 point lead on the issue of abortion. Trump had an equivalent lead on things like immigration. This meant going into the election, there were going to be millions of people who thought that Trump would be better on immigration and better on the economy, but would still vote for Harris. Likewise, there would be millions of people who thought that Harris would be better on abortion and still vote for Trump.

And so you can't just sort of say, well, I think this issue is important in this election and therefore this party is going to win. It's not that simple. At the same time, obviously, the economy and immigration, which were the top two issues, seem to play an important role in how people fell. I do agree. I would give a strong second place to the reasons people found Trump to be not a palatable candidate in this.

This is another place where we saw it over and over again in the data that people didn't really care about these things. I think they got a lot of attention. Democrats hoped that that would motivate a lot of votes. And for a lot of voters, it was just background noise. I mean, there was a good focus group that somebody did kind of middle of last year, and they just kept calling it white noise. And they heard this again and again from voters.

you know, it was really overrated. It just wasn't something voters cared about. Even if a lot of elites in the Democratic Party were like, are you and a lot of people, right? We're like, are you kidding? This is crazy. This guy has committed crimes. This guy says all of these horribly offensive things. Understanding voters and understanding that voters just didn't care about that was really important to understanding their vote choice.

All right, so the superlative of most overrated goes to the impact of the Dobbs decision on the 2024 election, with the runner-up being the political downside of Trump's legal issues. Moving on, I think I know where folks are going to land on this, but I'll ask it nonetheless. The most important issue that isn't the economy, and the nominees are immigration, abortion—I have to imagine you're not going to pick that one—or democracy.

Immigration. Immigration, yeah. That's all the polls. My follow-up question to this is we've already seen a split verdict in terms of how Democrats are reacting to Trump's victory on the issue of immigration. You see some...

blue state governors who are already saying, not in my state, like we are going to do whatever it takes to ensure that ICE can't deport people in my blue state or whatever it may be. Other people like in New York State and New York City in particular, Eric Adams just had a meeting with the nominee for border czar. And basically, they said they agree and they want to prioritize deporting people with criminal records in New York City.

Do Democrats take away from this election that they are wrong on immigration? Or do they take away from this election that opinion is just going to swing once Trump starts deporting people so they can keep the position that they've had for the past decade?

It's a good question. I will say there was a really good piece in The Atlantic yesterday sort of digging into how Democrats got where they were on immigration policy based on polling and looking at the polling from Latino decisions and some of the decisions that Latino decisions made on how they balanced percentage of Spanish language interviews.

Basically, the conclusion is that they may have had done too many Spanish language interviews and this sort of influenced Democratic decision making on what they thought that voters prioritized around immigration. And I know this is like I'm kind of getting into the weeds here, but this is to say, I think ultimately the answer to your question is Democrats.

There may be a backlash to some of Trump's immigration policies, but I also think they should take seriously how voters thought about immigration this election and not dismiss it as like a fluke or a one-off or whatever. I think voters are broadly supportive of a lot of these immigration decisions. And one of my colleagues, David Leonhardt, had an article yesterday or the day before looking at the rise in border crossings during the Biden administration. A lot of

this is a reaction to that. And I think Democrats would be wise to take that seriously. I do think there's reason to expect some backlash to some of the things Trump will do with deportation and family separation. But I think it would be unwise to let that swing in the other direction.

I think one of the interesting things that we see on the issue of immigration is that generally speaking, I think Democrats are to the left of the American people as a whole on this issue. And also that Republicans are to the right of the American people as a whole on this issue, which makes it pretty ripe for thermostatic public opinion to come into play because we saw this in the last two administrations. Donald Trump in his first administration said,

took some moves that were pretty far to the right of where the American people were and caused a huge backlash. And people went in the opposite direction. And then during the Biden administration, some steps were taken that were to the left of where the American people are and also caused a huge backlash. So I just wonder if this is just going to keep ping-ponging because neither party seems to have really managed to hone in on where the American people are, which is somewhere in between these two hardline positions. You know, wanting tight border security,

but also wanting protections for people like dreamers or children that may not have documentation in this country. There's a balance in the electorate here that I don't think you really see on either end of the political aisle. And I do also want to say here, I've said it before, it's not just playing politics here, right? Like the situation on the ground

materially changed. You know, the numbers that we now have are that Biden admitted 2 million new people into the country every year of his administration, 8 million in total, which is record breaking for the country.

And Americans reacted to that. And I mean, we know, historically speaking, that, you know, countries do have significant, often negative reactions to large increases in refugees or immigrants or whatever it may be. So this is not news. This is nothing is new under the sun. Also, you can just look at the past decade in Europe if you want other examples. And so I think it will also depend on what the situation on the ground continues to be.

Okay, so that superlative, more of a serious one, goes to immigration, the most important issue that isn't the economy. This one's a little less serious. The superlative is spends too much time on social media. And the nominees are... All of us. Everybody in America. I had that one. The Democrats. The Republicans.

Third party voters slash RFK Jr. And you've just suggested a new one. All of us. I stand by that. That's my pick. I think people who spend too much time online get an incorrect picture of Democrats and Republicans. It's the loudest, most partisan voices online. Well, of course, to that point as well, there's polling that backs this up, right? That partisans just have a super skewed view of the other party.

There was some work that was published in the Washington Post. At this point, it was years ago. But it was that Republicans think that some absurd percentage of Democrats are LGBTQ, like 50% or whatever. For Democrats, they think that half of Republicans are millionaires, like make over $200,000 a year or whatever. There's just really wild perceptions of the other party because you get such like...

a distilled, somewhat psychotic image of who the party is. So spends too much time on social media goes to all of us. The next one I love, which is most likely to succeed, dot, dot, dot, Donald Trump. Double entendre there. And the nominees are J.D. Vance.

Marco Rubio, Glenn Youngkin, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. Wait, are we selecting the most likely to be the president or be the presidential nominee? I think I would say nominee. Right. Whoever succeeds. Don't worry. We have it. We have a Democratic focus question next.

most likely to succeed Donald Trump as the leader of the Republican Party? I mean, I'm going to give the sort of like obvious answer here, but I think J.D. Vance. Obviously, Donald Trump has shown that he can alienate a vice president with the best of them, but...

Vance, you know, held his own. He did a really good job in the debate. I think he's won over a lot of skeptics in his own party and calmed some of the, you know, ways that people made fun of him on the other side. I think it is kind of his to lose. Yeah, who's making couch jokes now? Right.

That's not to say he won't lose it. It's just his to lose, I think. Yeah, I would agree with that. I would say a pretty strong runner-up for me is DeSantis.

The party has shown a lot of love toward him. Like there was a lot of excitement about him early on as a potential successor to the mega movement. But I you have to agree with Ruth. You know, the vice president is probably best positioned to take over the reins of the leadership here. And Vance does a pretty effective job of putting an intellectual veneer on top of like mega ideas, which doesn't.

And as we know, Trump is not always the most intellectually minded speaker, whereas Vance, I think, has more of a talent to talk in a way that sort of elite circles understand. But do they need that? I mean, are the Democrats now saying, OK, well, we got too much in the weeds. There's too much detail. There's too much, you know, too many particularities. We need a more blunt message like Donald Trump. I think about this a lot. What happens when Donald Trump goes away?

Because at some point he will. Right. So what what Trump has been pretty effective at doing is basically bullying the Republican Party into doing the things he wants, electing the people he wants, all of that. But I don't see anyone active in Republican politics now that has that sort of bully tendency that's going to be effective. In fact, every other candidate that's taken that tactic or approach politics from that angle has lost. Right.

So what they're going to need to do in order to maintain this sort of policy landscape is bring the Republican Party apparatus outside of the electorate on board with their agenda, which is going to mean like the think tank universe and the high dollar donors, your Silicon Valley libertarian thinkers and so on. I think you are going to need someone that can take what is—

a social movement really centered around a single person and make it into an intellectual movement that's adopted by the party. Today's podcast is brought to you by SelectQuote. In an uncertain world, life insurance can provide just a little bit of certainty. SelectQuote is one of America's leading insurance brokers with nearly 40 years of experience helping over 2 million customers find over $7 billion in coverage since 1985.

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All right, J.D. Vance, thank you, May. The superlative goes for you for most likely to succeed, dot, dot, dot, Donald Trump. Now, of course, the other side, most likely to succeed, the other meaning of succeed, as a Democrat. And the nominees are Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom,

Mayor Pete Buttigieg, now, of course, Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Andrew Yang. That's a curveball. Didn't expect that. How many of our listeners remember who Andrew Yang is, do you think? Oh, I hope a lot of them. I mean, he's been on this podcast from the Houston airport when I ran into him walking out of the airport bathroom and asked him to record a podcast with me. So again, we're talking about like succeed as the... As in we'll win the nomination for president.

It's a little far out. It sure is. Far out. I guess this, I mean, I don't know that I want to give you an easy out, but like what happens when senior year of high school and you're like best dressed? Oh, like no one is actually really best dressed. I don't know that we can give this award to anyone. I think I have a soft answer.

preference to say Mayor slash Secretary Pete. Oh my gosh, me too. Interesting. I thought people were going to pick Shapiro. Shapiro certainly has a chance to. I think, as Mary said, it's really hard to know what the policy landscape will look like and what the electorate will look like and what people will care about. I think there are certain issues where if those are the main issues, Shapiro could rise to the top. But I think that Buttigieg has really

I mean, one of the things he's done to really distinguish himself is spend a lot of time going on Fox News and fighting with Republicans. And I think I could easily imagine Democrats wanting a fighter going into this next election for fear of

of sort of like losing by playing by the rules again. And Mayor Pete has proven that he is up to that task. Yeah, yeah. Secretary Mayor Pete is just like a really effective communicator. And I think that's why I would agree that I have a generally soft preference for him. You know, a number of the names that get bandied about in this 2028 conversation, like Shapiro or Newsom, are maybe a little too polished.

In this moment of American politics, I think we've seen voters' preference for candidates that feel a little more real. You know, you said you might expect us to pick Shapiro, my governor. But I do think that he's maybe he maybe feels a little slick on the national stage in a way that Secretary Mayor Pete doesn't. You know, he's he's feels more real.

Well, I mean, certainly if we want to sort of get in our time machine and actually go forward from our 1980s John Hughes teensploitation moment to 2012, December of 2012, like not a single Republican would have told you that Donald Trump would be the next Republican nominee for president. So there is certainly an argument for just keep an open mind and that maybe by 2027, all of these names feel old. And...

you know, somebody without much baggage and with an ability to sort of break through, uh,

in a media kind of way. Like, Pete Buttigieg, the reason we all know who he is, is because he came onto the scene, stormed, like, every single media outlet in America, and became this phenomenon. Somebody could do that again in 2028 on the Democratic side. Okay, we're getting to the end here. We will have to title this yearbook, but Worst Trend of 2024. And this is both tongue-in-cheek, but also...

serious. The first nominee is Kamala being brat. The second is declining trust in institutions. And the third, this is not funny, political violence.

Making it really difficult. I think we might have a runaway winner here. Right. As cringy as Kamala Harris being a brat became. Yeah, I mean, political violence is bad, right? Like, there's no... But is it a trend in 2024? Well, I guess it seems like, from what I can tell, political violence and threats to political figures has increased over the past decade. Right.

This year, we saw two assassination attempts on the Republican nominee for president. That has not happened before in my lifetime. So again, I don't know if this is a trend or a blip on the sort of presidential nominee level, but on the societal wide level, it does seem like it is a trend. Yeah, and I guess arguably the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO could be classified as political violence as well. Of course. Yeah, I mean, I think

Mary's right to sort of parse these things, right? Like the interest in political violence among the public, it hasn't really risen. And like we've had some kind of catchy surveys that shows that it has. But when you actually have these kind of well-designed surveys that are able to get at this very difficult concept, we see that it hasn't increased. But you're absolutely right. I mean, two assassination attempts. When's the last time we had one assassination attempt, let alone two assassination attempts against a president? So yeah, that is certainly on the rise and is...

I would call the worst trend. Although I did have to Google who Charlie XCX is, which I resent. To end on a lighter note, best frenemies of 2024. First nominee, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi. Second nominee, Kamala Harris and the Cheneys, Dick and Liz. And the third nominee, RFK Jr. and the dead bear. Oh.

OK, that's my pick. That's a runaway winner. Which was, of course, brought to light only because of former podcaster, 538 podcaster Claire Malone's diligent reporting in The New Yorker. Wonderful gripping article that she wrote. Well, Ruth is going with the bear, but I have to go with Biden and Pelosi. I think...

I mean, Pelosi did say she's still losing sleep over this. It's true. Yeah. No, Pelosi working behind the scenes to force the nominee of her own party to drop out of the presidential race. That is cold. And that's it for me.

Okay, so we have a split decision on best frenemies between Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and RFK Jr. and the dead bear. And you know what? I think we might just make room like the formatting of the yearbook just like turns out such that we can include both. We can hold space for both. We can create space on the yearbook page for both. So congratulations to Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, RFK Jr. and the dead bear for best frenemies of 2024.

To wrap this all up, we got to give our yearbook a name. We got to title it. We're going to headline 2024 in politics. What is it? Well, you know, I mean, go back to my yearbook year, right? It was like probably like the time of your life or whatever Green Day song was popular. The 538 2024 yearbook. I hope you had the time of your life. See, when I look back at 2024, I just think,

Like 2024, what the f*** just happened? That's a good title. What other lyrics can we pull from? 2024, after all, you're my wonderwall? I don't think that works. Well, what songs were popular this year? I'm the wrong person to ask. Brat? Hot to go. Good luck, babe. Yes, there we go. I think there we go. That's a great one. 2024, the 538 yearbook. Good luck, babe.

Perfect. Now I'm gonna have to Google another thing. And with that, thank you so much, Mary and Ruth for helping me assemble the FiveThirtyEight yearbook team. I very much appreciate it. See you here next year at this exact same time. But thank you for now. Thank you. Thanks, Galen. Have a good holiday season.

My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Tretavian. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you soon.

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