The Pennsylvania Senate Race Is On A Knife’s Edge
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You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad. Reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lips and 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 Lips and Ads. Go to Lipsandads.com now. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N-ads.com. Did anyone dress up for Halloween? I was Mermaid Man from Spongebob.

Mermaid man. Like on a scale from one to 10, how all in were you? I mean, I think my costume was like a 10 out of 10. My wife and I, I will be a pancake and she will be a bottle of syrup. We live in Vermont. It had to be like a fun maple syrup reference, right? That's fair. My costume is more in line with your costume, Jeffrey, than Alex's. I was a cup of coffee. Nice. Because it's the only thing that's going to get me through the next week. Okay.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk, and happy Halloween to those who celebrate. We are now one week away from Election Day. The Senate forecast shows essentially a coin flip. Democrats have a 52% chance of keeping the chamber. In the House, meanwhile, Republicans have an 82% chance of flipping that chamber.

The governor's races in Wisconsin, Nevada, and Oregon are all still toss-ups, but Arizona now leans Republican. Today, we're going to talk about one of the main elections responsible for the tightening in the race for the Senate, Pennsylvania. After opening up a 10-point lead in the polling average just last month, John Fetterman now leads Dr. Oz by only one point. Much of that movement came before last week's debate, but we'll look at how voters are reacting to that too.

We're also going to dive into our final pre-election round of issue polling, which we've been conducting with Ipsos throughout the year. It shows the highest level of concern about inflation of all six surveys that we've done. We also ask likely voters what they think about the two parties as they get ready to choose one.

And what happened to Stacey Abrams? The Democratic Party star is struggling in the governor's race in Georgia with just a 9% chance of victory over Governor Brian Kemp. Here with me to discuss it all is senior writer Amelia Thompson-DeVoe. Hey, Amelia. Hey, Galen. Also here with us is politics reporter Alex Samuels. Hey, Alex. Hi there. And senior elections analyst Jeffrey Skelly. Hey, Jeff. Hey, Galen. So how's everyone feeling with just a week left until Election Day? Oh.

I'm so excited. Excited? Okay. All right. Yeah. I can appreciate that. Look, this is our job. No one's holding a gun to our heads, I hope. Please tell me if they are. I mean, it's gonna, you know, once this is over, it's 2024.

All the time. All right, so that is the spirit I don't like, Jeff. Well, let me just tell you, that's what's going to happen. No, I love that. I need elections in my life. This is the calm before the storm, everyone. I know, but like, don't just like, let me live in the moment. So I'm actually kind of cool with this week being a little bit slow, you know, like. Slow. Let's take our time with it because once it hits,

It's going to be 2024 all the time. That's what you should go as for Halloween, Jeff. 2024. The specter. The ghost of Christmas future or something. Yeah. Yeah.

Before we get going, I want to quickly lay out the plan for the coming week or so, which you think will be the calm before the storm. Maybe in some ways it will be. But nonetheless, on the podcast, we're going to be ramping things up. So we'll have three podcasts this week. Today, we're going to have a Model Talk episode on Wednesday, another pod on Friday. Then we'll record our final pre-election Model Talk episode on Monday. Then Tuesday night, of course, once we...

either have results or it gets late enough that we want to go to bed. Even if we still don't have results, we'll record a podcast. And then from there, it's truly anyone's guess what the week looks like, but we will have coverage for you all. But let's get to today's show. Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania, John Fetterman and Dr. Mehmet Oz debated in the only Pennsylvania Senate debate this cycle.

Fetterman has been recovering from a severe stroke since May, and this was one of his few times answering questions from the press and his first time engaging with his opponent since then.

Fetterman has refused to release his health records, although his doctor has said that he has an audio processing disorder and that he is fit to serve. Here's a clip from that debate featuring one of Fetterman's answers about fracking. I do want to clarify something. You're saying tonight that you support fracking, that you've always supported fracking. But there is that 2018 interview that you said, quote, I don't support fracking at all. So how do you square the two?

I do support fracking and I don't, I don't, I support fracking and I stand and I do support fracking. And here's a clip of an answer Oz gave on the issue of abortion that Fetterman has since run ads on.

Should abortion be banned in America? 60 seconds. There should not be involvement from the federal government in how states decide their abortion decisions. As a physician, I've been in the room when there's some difficult conversations happening. I don't want the federal government involved with that at all. I want women, doctors, local political leaders, letting the democracy that's always allowed our nation to thrive, to put the best ideas forward so states can decide for themselves.

The reaction to the debate largely focused on Fetterman's difficulty during the debate. So let's talk about how voters are reacting, if they are, and what it means for the race overall. So Jeff, I know that you have been looking into this since the debate. What have the polls of the Pennsylvania Senate race showed since last Tuesday?

So because this only happened on last Tuesday, we don't really have very much data so far in terms of before and after comparisons from pollsters. So, you know, a poll conducted entirely before the debate and one conducted entirely after. In fact, we just have two as of our recording here. And one found oddities.

Oz improving by three and a half points. They released decibels. And the other found Fetterman actually improving by three points, even though that poll from WIC was cited by a lot of media outlets as evidence that Fetterman was in trouble. But the funny thing was that compared to their previous poll before the debate, it actually was better for Fetterman in terms of margin. So I think

It's pretty unclear at the moment just how this has affected things. I know that The New York Times and Santa College also just released a poll on Monday, which included a test of the Senate race in Pennsylvania, and they found Fetterman ahead. But the polling actually basically straddled the date of the debate, so it's difficult to know for sure if they really have anything there that tells us just how much the debate may have affected the race.

So we're getting some sense of how voters are reacting to it. How many voters watched the debate? Do we have a sense of what the reach was or maybe heard about the debate after the fact? I mean, I'll just tell you that probably almost nobody watched the debate who wasn't very, very engaged with politics or a journalist. So most of the people watching the debate at a baseline are people who already have their minds made up or they are people who need to write about the debate.

So most of the public's response to the debate comes from the media coverage of the debate in the aftermath. So that's where like obviously the coverage of Fetterman's sort of halting responses and the headlines of him struggling could have an effect.

At the same time, you have Mehmet Oz's answer about abortion and Democrats really leaning into that. It's evidence that Oz wants to leave it up to political leaders locally. And Fetterman's campaign specifically has been running this ad, basically tying that answer to Doug Mastriano, the controversial Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, who is viewed as very far to the right.

And so basically saying Oz would want people like Doug Mastriano making decisions about your access to abortion, whereas Republicans are running ads where they they're not saying it directly, but they are very clearly referencing Fetterman's struggles in the debate to sort of say that he's not up to the job. So that's what we're getting out of it.

Yeah, and an Emerson College poll released before the debate even happened, an increasing number of voters were saying that Fetterman's stroke was making them less likely to support him. 27% said that in the latest poll. Why was this happening, Amelia, if you have thoughts, before the debate happened?

Well, I mean, I think that's evidence for the theory that Jeff was just putting forward, which is this is about media coverage. And Fetterman had an interview with NBC News a couple weeks ago that got a lot of coverage where he had asked for basically simultaneous subtitles of the questions because of the auditory processing issues that he's had since the stroke.

And that was a lot of the focus of the NBC interview. His health in general was something that got a lot of coverage around it. And then also comments from NBC News reporters who were saying that they felt that in conversations in the green room beforehand, he was not really tracking what they were saying, which is...

It to me is a bit of an odd comment because you would expect him to not process information as well if he didn't have the accommodation that he asked for to actually be able to process the information. But I think in general, the debate definitely gave rise to a whole new slew of media coverage. But this was already something that was being discussed quite extensively going into the debate. And of course, the question of whether he would debate at all was getting a lot of coverage, too. Yeah.

Yeah, Jeff, the New York Times poll that you mentioned in Pennsylvania, most of the poll was conducted before the debate, but part of it was conducted after. And this is what they had to say about the responses after the debate. They say, quote, In calls made on Wednesday, the night after the matchup, a plurality of voters said Mr. Fetterman was not healthy enough to do the job, though Mr. Fetterman still managed a slight lead over Dr. Oz amongst all Wednesday respondents.

That was a shift from the previous two evenings when majorities rated him as sufficiently well to serve in the Senate. What should we make of this? That a plurality of voters are saying that they don't think he's necessarily healthy enough to serve, but that they still support him in the race. Kaelin, where's my partisanship button? I would like to use it.

Yeah, I left it at home. I'm in the studio today. Sorry, someone else should jump in and say something more sophisticated. But that's all I've got to say on this one.

I think Amelia is right in the sense that it's easy to imagine, like we don't know the crosstab data from that subsample on Wednesday, but it's easy to imagine Republicans almost uniformly answering that Fetterman is not up to the job. Most Democrats responding that he is up to the job and a lot of independents saying, I don't know. And maybe more of them saying, I don't know than previously. Like when you say a plurality, it's sort of unclear, like just how things shifted. I do think that what it shows is that

Among the very small number of swing voters that are out there, it is possible that this is damaging for Fetterman. I think at the same time, though, we don't really have evidence of that being true yet.

And the other thing that's going to be really difficult about sussing that out is that the race was tightening before all this happened anyway. Some of that may have come down to the coverage about his health, but also some of it may have just been Republicans coming home to Oz because Oz was part of this very contentious, divisive primary result that involved a recount, was very close.

And if Republicans come home to Oz, we should expect this race to tighten. And I think to some extent that is what has happened. And so separating that from Fetterman losing support among maybe people who previously supported him is harder to know for sure. Yeah. So I think when it comes to sort of this question of his health and wellness post-stroke, I

Some folks are talking about this as, you know, he is a candidate who now has a disability and needs accommodations and disability rights activists are saying, this is great. More disabled people should run for office and make it clear that they are disabled and may need accommodations like anyone else who works a job who is disabled and needs accommodations.

Other people saying, you know, he's not releasing any of his health records. So we actually have no idea what his capacity is beyond what we can observe ourselves. And in the debate, he clearly had difficulty. And so questioning what it would be like for him to be a senator where a lot of your job is communication, interacting with the public, et cetera, et cetera. What do we know about how voters in general, Alex, view disability amongst the politicians that we do have who are disabled?

We don't have enough evidence to say for certain whether candidates with disabilities have a lower chance of winning elections, but we do know that they are drastically underrepresented in politics. So at the federal level, just over 6% of elected officials reported having a disability, and that's compared with 12% at the local level. And I'm citing research and polling numbers here from professors at Rutgers University.

But that said, physical and cognitive disabilities are often perceived differently. I think a lot of stigma regarding physical disabilities has decreased over the last few decades. No one's really questioning whether Texas Governor Greg Abbott or North Carolina Representative Madison Cawthorn

is unfit to serve because they both use wheelchairs. But I think that impairments that affect one's ability, like you said, to communicate effectively may be more stigmatizing and harder to digest because they could get linked in voters' minds to issues like mental capacity or cognitive decline. Yeah, and of course, cognitive decline has been a hot topic for candidates and politicians on both sides of the aisle over the past decade.

several years. Is it clear what voters think about that, having had older candidates, older politicians who the evidence seems to suggest have experienced cognitive decline? Yeah. So, I mean, we see this with folks who, you know, President Biden, Dianne Feinstein. It's those same questions with politicians who are a bit older. And there have been reports of, you know, maybe they should step down from public office.

That said, if there's anything working to Fetterman's advantage, if you want to call it that, is that 69 million people in the 2020 electorate either had a disability themselves or lived with someone with a disability. So that's about one third of the population. And so Fetterman has said too that this experience has given him a greater understanding in understanding the challenges that people with disabilities face.

So it is possible that what he's going through now could resonate with voters and people could see it as he's a candidate who's recovering from this illness and that might demonstrate grit and resilience. His doctors have also said, and Fetterman himself has said, that they expect his condition to improve. I'm not quite sure how voters are perceiving his disability, but as we said earlier, I think voters

A lot of how voters will perceive Fetterman's, you know, whether he's fit to serve, if you want to call it that, will not be so much based on his debate performance, but the media coverage following the debate. So beyond the question of Fetterman's performance during the debate, they did discuss a lot of issues. And I think one of the main conflicts in the debate was how...

How politically extreme is each candidate? Because Pennsylvania is a very purple state with a somewhat swingy electorate. And it's in both candidates' interests, I would say, to come across as the more moderate candidate, which is something that Oz really leaned into. He's called himself a moderate. He was painting Fetterman's positions as more progressive and further left than he is right-wing.

Is it clear what voters sort of thought of that dynamic or how that dynamic is playing out in the race overall? Like, are moderate candidates actually doing better in the polls this cycle? In the aftermath of the debate, along with trying to cast Fetterman as unfit, you saw Republicans running ads calling Fetterman extreme repeatedly. So there definitely is a concerted effort to present Oz as the more moderate or

reasonable candidate in the race, whereas trying to cast Fetterman as too extreme for Pennsylvania. And Fetterman definitely has this progressive background in terms of his viewpoints on a lot of things. Maybe that doesn't fit with the fracking answer, but in terms of support for things like a $15 minimum wage, that kind of thing. So in some respects, you can see how someone would try to cast Fetterman in that light. But the flip side, of course, is that Fetterman's campaign is trying to present Oz as too extreme on issues like abortion and

And I guess it's also just a question of, is there this other part of Oz being sort of like a snake oil salesman or something? How much of a Pennsylvanian is he? He's on TV. Is there another form of extreme here that's not so much political ideology, but extreme in terms of

I think there was a Fetterman line in an ad about like Oz lying every time he opens his mouth or something. He said that in the debate a lot. Yeah. Yes. So like you could see how that's not the same as like ideological extremism, but it is a like he's an extreme case of a candidate or something.

Right. Well, in trying to paint him as untrustworthy in the same way that you might not trust an extreme candidate to represent your views or the average Pennsylvanian's views. I think that's that's an interesting way of putting it, Jeff. And that's certainly something the Fetterman campaign has been leaning into. But also, I mean, in Oz's candidacy, Doug Mastriano could be a drag candidate.

on Oz particularly. So it's possible that Oz needs more than Republicans and that could be why he's moving more towards the middle to try and court these more moderate and independent voters.

Polls show that more voters in Pennsylvania are backing Josh Shapiro and the gubernatorial race over Mastroianno. So I think Oz does need that crossover support. And I think that, again, could be another reason why he's trying to posit himself as this more moderate candidate while also painting Fetterman as the more extreme one.

Totally, Alex. And I mean, I think that's also why his comment about abortion was such an unforced error, really. I mean, he's sort of trying to draw this bizarre line between no federal intervention, but local elected leaders should have a say in the decision, which...

Folks who do message testing should correct me. My experience of reading the polls for a long time on this is that voters are not really making a distinction between whether federal elected leaders versus local elected leaders, like this idea of the state should decide.

is one thing, but I think that's more about people in the state actually deciding. And Mastriano is known for being very extreme on abortion. When he was in the state Senate, he pushed repeatedly for a six-week ban on abortion, and that was before these were really mainstream. So I think that does potentially hurt Oz, who...

could have made a plausible case to be more moderate on abortion. And he's, I think, trying to kind of thread that needle, but his comments in the debates, I doubt, will help him. I feel like both of them are kind of trying to thread that needle. I remember that debate question where basically they asked...

each candidate, would you support your respective party's leader if they ran for president in 2024? And Oz kind of demurred in the beginning, but he did say that like he would support Trump if he ran again for president in 2024. And Fetterman essentially said the same thing about Biden. So while I guess I necessarily didn't expect anything different from either of them, I do think it's interesting that they're both intentionally choosing not to distance themselves from their party's respective leaders.

Yeah, maybe in some ways you make more news than you want to by distancing yourself from those potential candidates. I mean, that would be every headline the day after. Like it would not matter what else happened at that debate if either of them said they wouldn't support Trump or Biden. That would be huge.

All right. Well, it sounds like in total, we need more data before we can really judge how the debate is affecting that race. But we have enough data already to say that that debate has tightened significantly and has gone a significant way in making our forecast a 50-50 proposition in the Senate. So we will come back to this race. But let's move on and talk about our final pre-election round of issue polling with Ipsos.

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The sixth installment of FiveThirtyEight's collaboration with Ipsos is out, and this is the last installment before the midterms, with the final ranking of the most important issues to voters.

The latest round, we also asked Americans what they generally think of the two parties and why they believe either party should or shouldn't win control of Congress. First, let's get into which issues voters rated as their top concerns. So inflation and increasing costs have been the top concern of voters each wave that we have done this. Jeff, what change, if any, did we see there? Well, I think the big news is that

the highest percentage that we've recorded in any wave said that they viewed inflation or increasing costs as like a top issue facing the country. So 65% of respondents answered that way. To be clear, people could pick up to three of the 20 options we gave them. So it's not just straightforward from 54% in our last poll to 65%, but it does reflect that more people and the highest percentage that we've had in any wave said that they were worried about that. So

To me, that aligns with sort of the shifts I think we saw in news coverage. And it's not to say that news coverage is driving all that. I think there's also reporting about like inflation has not improved that much and people are more worried about it. But as we were getting closer to Election Day, it seemed like this was a topic that was more top of mind for people than during parts of the summer when maybe things like abortion were getting more attention. But now that we're getting up to Election Day –

People are worried about inflation and inflation has not disappeared as an issue. And if anything, maybe it got worse sort of in the timing of when we were doing this poll. Jeff, it strikes me that one of the things that's really tricky in this polling is trying to figure out, is it that people's interest in something is actually going down or is it that their concern about something else is going up?

and is eclipsing it. Do we have any way of teasing that out in the polling we've done with Ipsos? Well, in theory, because people can choose up to three things. If you see one thing going up a lot, one other thing holding steady and something else like going down a lot, you know, that might at least be an indication that the thing holding steady has remained important in people's minds.

Because this is a panel survey, it might be possible at the end to go back and try to do a more careful tracking of how people change their answers over time. It's a little complex with some of the waiting questions and how you go about doing that. But I mean, it can be done. It's just we didn't have time to do it right here with this release. So that would be something interesting to go back and look on for sure.

Inflation encompasses or can encompass a lot of things. And I would think things that, you know, the growing cost of living, the looming possibility of a recession, the stock market, those things are all top of mind for voters, too. And I don't know if all those things fall under the inflation umbrella, according to our survey. But is it possible that all these factors are impacting voters' decisions as well?

Oh, I think it's entirely possible. To be clear, the answer, as respondents see it, is inflation or increasing costs. So that obviously can cover the gamut of things that people are having to spend money on, whether it's groceries or housing or what have you.

I think this is an open question, right? As we get into the final stretch of this campaign, we have seen increasingly voters say that they're worried about the economy and a growing spread in terms of which party voters trust to address the economy, that being in favor of Republicans.

I'm curious, do you guys have some theories as to why? Is it just that it's been long enough since the Dobbs decision came down that to the extent that abortion was eclipsing any of the economic coverage? Because in reality, the inflation rate certainly hasn't gone down since the summer, but it hasn't really continued to go up. It's held about steady at a 40-year high.

But like, could it just be messaging? Increasingly, as we get closer to the election, parties are pulling out their general election messaging. And it's really about the economy. And therefore, voters are also feeling it too. Like, what are the theories for why, as we get closer to Election Day, this matters so much? I mean, I think part of it is people's perceptions are built in part on have things recently changed. And if people aren't feeling like things are progressing in terms of like inflation going down, like if inflation had consistently gone down for the last couple of months, it

Gas prices had tumbled from $4 to under $3 or something. People might be feeling more positive about changes in the economy, but there hasn't been a change in a positive direction for people. I think if they're assessing whether things are getting better on that front, they don't have a ton of evidence to get them to think that. In their minds, it's like things aren't getting better. For instance, when things were really bad after the 2008-2009 financial crisis, it's like,

You saw a point where people were worried about the economy. But even when things weren't like booming, like after the stimulus and other things, like people did think the economy was getting better even if things weren't booming. So it's really about in relation to where things were. And I think at the moment, things haven't gotten that much better yet.

such that people feel like things are improving. And in fact, you see in polling a lot of pessimism about the future, like there could be a recession. We think things will get worse from here. I do think also the fact that Dobbs was a while ago, and more importantly, that abortion just really hasn't been in the headlines for the past month or so, is likely contributing as well, just by not reminding people that this is such a big issue that is...

affecting large parts of the country because there was a period over the summer when, you know, all these abortion bans were going into effect. There were headlines about that. There were headlines about how people were being affected by the bans. And that's largely receded, even though Democrats obviously are still trying to remind voters that all of this happened. And I think that has to be a factor, too. I also wonder how much of it is that Democrats really

I think haven't been able to give a very effective argument about what they would do on abortion. You know, there's been this talk about how, oh, you know, we need to have more federal protections for abortion, but like that's all kind of vague and would rely on a level of power in Congress that the Democrats are vanishingly unlikely to get. And so I wonder if that is part of it for voters too, that they care about abortion,

But they maybe see this as like an issue they care about in a governor's race in a state where it will matter, but not necessarily in the national picture or not in a blue state where they know abortion access is like not likely to change, for example, in Oregon in the near future. And so it doesn't have to be a top concern for voters there in the same way, even though Democrats are obviously hoping that it will be.

So going on down from inflation in the last two waves of this issue polling, we've seen actually political extremism rank as the second biggest concern for Americans. That's a big umbrella, and I'm sure different respondents view it in different ways.

How should we unpack that and how political extremism might be shaping voters' behavior in this cycle in general? Right. So one of the things we did in this poll was we spent more time looking at what likely voters were thinking because they're the ones who are likely to make the decisions about the future of governance in the country with the election just about to happen.

And I think you can particularly see how political extremism and polarization pops up there. It has consistently been the second most mentioned topic overall among likely voters throughout our polling. So to give some sense of that, it's like among likely voters, we had just a bit less than 1,000 of those in the sample. 63% named inflation or increasing costs as a top issue, which was basically the same as all respondents, all adults reported.

Political extremism and polarization, 45 percent of likely voters said it was a top issue facing the country, whereas only about a third of all respondents said that. And this is driven largely by Democrats and independents. A majority of both named it as a top issue, whereas Republicans only about a quarter did.

And if you look actually at vote intention among those, it was like roughly 70 percent planned to vote for a Democrat on the generic ballot. Whereas among those answering inflation, it was I think it was like in the mid 50s were planning to vote for Republican, like a clear Republican edge. Though, to be clear, a large number of Democrats also mentioned inflation or increasing costs as a concern.

Yeah.

If people are dissatisfied or refuse to accept the results of the election. Well, we have open ended responses that we've had throughout this. So people could sort of write whatever they thought about a given issue. And we did an entire poll focused on political polarization and extremism. Try to figure some of this stuff out.

And I would say a lot of it came down to the parties not cooperating, to the feeling that there's no room for any agreement to be found. People are very angry at the other side. We talk about

negative partisanship all the time. The idea that a Democrat or a Republican really doesn't like the other side, even if they're not even happy with their own side, they are on average very likely to have serious antipathy toward the other party. And that showed up in those open-ended answers. I mean, I do think some of that is tied to fears about the future of the country and what we saw in the aftermath of January 6th. But some of it also coming from the Republican side is feeling like

You know, Democrats are running amok. The government's not functioning well. So some of it could also be tied up in like a question that or one of the forms of the topics that Gallup likes to group its version of this question in, which is like poor government, poor leadership. Like some of that could be rolled into this. And I think that's probably that's part of why we don't have an answer like that. So I think some of that is also reflected in this answer. It's like things are dysfunctional and polarization is like a big part of that.

Or maybe even people feeling like their views aren't represented by politicians. And as they start to tune into the election more and start paying more attention to what politicians are actually saying, it makes sense to me that they would be thinking about that more. I mean, that's a consistent theme when I talk to voters, that they feel like they just don't see their

beliefs and priorities reflected among the people who are running for office on both sides. They might dislike one side more, as you were saying, Jeff, but in general, they're not super happy with the state of politics overall. So I wonder if part of it is people paying more attention as the election gets closer and feeling more of a sense of dissatisfaction with the options that they have.

Yeah, I mean, I think we could probably do a whole podcast series on political extremism, partisanship, how voters view the other side, what exactly voters are concerned about when they think about political extremism. You could mention so many things from racism.

January 6th to protests to, of course, the most recent incident that we saw in San Francisco with an attacker breaking into Nancy Pelosi's house and attacking her husband, Paul Pelosi. And he ended up in the hospital. It seemed as though the attacker was looking for the House speaker herself. And so I'm sure Americans look at that and are worried about the state of affairs. I think

We look at the polling about fear of political violence in the future. We see that it's going up. I think the good news in the polling is that the vast, vast, vast majority of Americans on both sides of the aisle reject political violence under any circumstance. The bad news is there are small percentages but significant percentages who say that it is sometimes acceptable to use violence in a circumstance where you don't get your political way. And in a really big country, even small percentages of people can be a disruptive force.

In this most recent poll specifically, Ipsos asked voters about how they view their own party and how they view the other party. And maybe this gets at a little bit of what we're talking about here with not the political violence part, but the just political polarization part. What did you find when you asked voters about the two parties?

In part, we asked people if they sort of understood the other party or if they thought they understood the values and beliefs of their party and the other party. We asked this broadly because some people don't necessarily identify with either party. So do you understand the values and beliefs of the Democratic Party? Do you understand the values and beliefs of the Republican Party? People from their own party generally were much more likely to say that they understood that party's values, though –

I think what was really interesting was just some of the open-ended responses that we got in relation to this question. For example, we had a Democrat from California who said the GOP aims to, quote, protect the rich and corrupt, lie in gaslight to full citizens, utilize religion and the media to control the narrative, and reinstate racism and division.

And then we had a woman from New Hampshire who identified as Republican argued Democrats, quote, want people dependent on the government, unquote, and quote, are in favor of murdering babies and keeping people poor, unquote. So like, to be clear, these were not the only respondents. We did not like pick the most controversial responses in the open-endeds there. Like people have very strong feelings about the other party. And this ties back to what we were talking about with like negative partisanship. That is not to say that every response was like,

angry or mean in that way about the other party. It was varied, but we definitely got lots of responses that were of that ilk. Are people more motivated to vote for their own party or to vote against the other party? I mean, I think these days against is more likely the case. And I think a lot of the research on negative partisanship and political polarization bears that out. You could be a Republican who feels like

The rhinos are still in control of the party, like just to take the example of the kind of rhetoric we sometimes hear and sometimes saw in these open-ended questions. But you're still going to vote for the Republican over the Democrat because you really don't like the Democrats and vice versa. So there's been polling also about like the positive, negative feelings toward each party. And it's like people from their own party vote.

The feeling might have even slipped a little bit like it's been sort of flat, but maybe even gone down a bit in terms of how favorable their attitudes are toward their own party. But their attitudes toward the other party have just collapsed. They are just so negative now. They've gone down so much. So to me, the anti other party motivation is like a huge part of this.

So all of these preferences on issues came together into voters supporting either the Republican or the Democratic candidate. We have an average of generic ballot polling that brings all of these polls together, but this is just one specific example. And I think our average currently shows Republicans leading by about a point in the generic ballot. But what did this poll show?

Well, one of the interesting things with our poll is that it's a panel survey, so we keep asking the same people over and over again. And in this latest one on the sort of initial generic ballot question, we found a 41-41 tie on vote intention.

But because the election was right around the corner, we wanted to push some of the people who said they were undecided or were backing an independent or other candidate. Because at the end of the day, most people are going to vote for the Democrat or the Republican in their local house race. One or two percent will vote for someone else. So when we pushed people who did not respond for either of the major parties and added them in, we ended up with about a 49-48 Democratic edge, but essentially with decimals and margin of error,

Basically, it was a tie. So that spoke to a very competitive political environment, not necessarily the red wave that gets talked about. And this has largely been the case throughout our polling, at least without that push question. It's been nearly tied like the whole time, except the first wave when Republicans had a clearer lead. Yeah, it's been very close throughout. So it didn't change post-Dobbs in a meaningful way.

No, or at least not one that was outside of the margin of error and was not notable. No, which I thought was interesting as well. Now, again, this was complicated by people saying other or answering other, but there's not been like a big shift in our generic ballot polling. I wonder if, you know, because...

What I was seeing in some polling and kind of speculation about what might be going on with some of the Democrats like immediate post Dobbs bump was that people who are less likely to be likely voters were the ones who were really upset about the abortion decision. And that's always been something that I've been a little bit skeptical about, that we would see this huge wave of.

of young people in particular coming out to vote. And so I wonder if that's just a complicating factor too, that people who Democrats might really need to turn out are just not likely to be voting at all in a midterm election. Well, obviously midterm turnout is much lower than presidential turnout usually, although, you know, about half of the voting eligible population showed up in the 2018 midterm, which was the highest since 2019.

women got the right to vote, basically. So I'm expecting high turnout again in this midterm. But of course, the thing is, we also know that in a midterm environment, the party not in the White House, their voters on average tend to turn out at a higher rate. We saw this in 2018, obviously, for Democrats, and we saw it for Republicans in 2014 and 2010. So in this higher turnout environment, though, compared to like 2010 and 2014,

I think that some of the elections we've seen, like the 2021 gubernatorial elections, like Virginia, for instance, had very high turnout for a gubernatorial election, but Republicans still turned out at a higher rate. And so I think the big question going into next week is like, is that going to happen again? We'll have high turnout, but Republicans just turn out at a higher rate. That would be very understandable given the fundamentals of the election. All right. Well, let's wrap up with a look at the governor's race in Georgia.

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Georgia must be getting pretty used to the political spotlight. After deciding control of the Senate last year, it's got high-profile Senate and gubernatorial races this year. But while the Senate race is very close and may even end up being the tipping point race, the gubernatorial race doesn't appear to be.

According to our forecast, Senator Raphael Warnock has a 52% chance of winning against Herschel Walker, but Stacey Abrams only has a 9% chance of victory against Governor Brian Kemp. So what gives? After becoming a star of the Democratic Party in 2018, why is Abrams struggling now? And I think there are a few ways to tackle this question, which Alex, you have done in a piece that's up on the website today, so folks should go check it out on FiveThirtyEight.com. But

What does the data show? With which parts of the electorate is Abrams underperforming? Yeah, so I will start by saying that Abrams is doing great among Democratic voters. And in fact, she has stronger support among Democrats than Kemp does with Republicans. And I'm citing one Monmouth University survey that was fielded in September, where she does appear to be struggling the most, however, is with independent voters as well as with Black men.

So in October, a Data for Progress poll showed Kemp netting 15 percent of the black vote compared to Abrams' 79 percent. Meanwhile, independent voters and third party voters, according to that same survey, they also largely sided with Kemp. And he got 49 percent of that vote compared to Abrams' 38 percent.

And I should say, first of all, this is obviously a different electoral environment than 2018. So we would not expect a repeat, right? There was a backlash to Donald Trump. Democrats won the House popular vote by eight and a half points in 2018. And we expect Republicans to win the House popular vote probably this year. So it's just a different environment overall. But the comparison that we can make is between Abrams and Warnock.

And again, there are various reasons that we can look to. But what are some of the explanations for Abrams' underperformance, maybe compared to Warnock, not necessarily compared to 2018? I mean, I think incumbency very much matters. Kemp now has a record to run on, very similar to Warnock. And according to some reports, Georgia's economy is doing rather well. So I think Kemp could stand to benefit from that and, in fact, has been campaigning pretty heavily on that.

But I think, like you mentioned, Galen, the national environment is just really playing to his advantage this year. The economy and inflation is top of mind for Georgia voters like it is for most Americans this year.

And Kemp, again, is playing into that as a political point to keep him in office. And I also think in asserting his independence from Trump following the 2020 election, he might have, you know, whether it was intentional or not, positioned himself to the left of the mainstream GOP, which could bode well for him in the state, especially, again, among those more moderate and independent voters. Yeah, I mean, one of the big questions for me in Georgia is that

Traditionally, when you have two big races like this for Senate and governor on the ballot at the same time, the results run pretty close together. If the Republican wins 53-47-1, you expect the Republican to win the other one like 54-46. It's like they run pretty close together. One of the interesting things we're seeing in Georgia this cycle is

at least some divide between the Senate and gubernatorial races. So like right now, the difference in the margin between those races is about eight points in our polling average. Like Warnock's up one, Kemp's up seven. So it's like eight points along the line. So, um,

I think the narrower that is, the better it is for Republicans. Given Kemp is in a much better position electorally, the closer those races run together, the better it is for Herschel Walker in the Senate race as the Republican nominee. And the farther apart they are, the better it is for Warnock because it reflects the choices made by a small group of swingy voters in a state like Georgia, which is extremely polarized, especially along racial lines. It's one of the most racially polarized states in the country.

In that environment, what that small group of voters chooses to do is really just critical to deciding the outcome. And I mean, you could broaden that statement out to lots of races, but I think especially in Georgia with an incumbent from each party,

In the race with Warnock as a Democratic incumbent and Kemp as a Republican incumbent, has Warnock done enough to win over those voters or has Herschel Walker done enough to dissuade some of those Kemp voters from voting for him and either voting for Walker or abstaining or voting for the libertarian in the race?

It's very unclear to me how that's going to play out. And I think you can sort of make the case for either party for it working out for them. So I'm expecting a runoff in the Senate in December because that's just what we'll get. The election will not be over in November. I'm just already planning ahead. Jeff and Alex, you've both written articles about what's going on in Georgia. And I'm curious if you see that difference between Warnock and Abrams as a sign that Warnock is overperforming,

relative to how you might expect, or that Abrams is underperforming? My thought is that, to some extent, Warnock is overperforming. I mean, look, Georgia is, I mean, a state that Joe Biden very, very narrowly won in 2020. But if it reverts at all to form, it is a Republican-leaning state.

And while it's not necessarily reverting to past form, we also know that it's a midterm environment with an unpopular Democrat in the White House. So like there are reasons to think that the balance of things should be better for Republicans than it was in 2020 or especially 2018. And to me, that makes it tougher for Democrats, obviously, to win either of these races. Warnock, though, maybe because he's facing a problematic Republican candidate, he's

or has done enough to endear himself to some voters in the middle, maybe he's in a position to outrun those baselines and potentially win. Whereas it looks like Abrams is in a lot of trouble on that front.

But to that point, both Warnock and Abrams are fairly popular in the state of Georgia. I mean, Kemp is as well. And like you kind of waved at Jeff, Biden is not particularly popular in the state, just like he's not particularly popular with the rest of the country. So there was an October Quinnipiac survey that found just 44 percent of likely voters in the state approved of Biden's job performance.

By comparison, 51% approved of Warnock's performance and 48% had a favorable opinion of Abrams. 49% of voters had a favorable view of Kemp as well. So is it possible that Biden could drag both of these candidates down? I don't know. Is it possible that Kemp is popular enough to kind of

drag Walker across the finish line with him? Like, I don't know. Those are questions that I'm interested in teasing out more as we get closer to the election. You said, though, Alex, that Abrams appeared to be struggling more with independents and Black men. What's the explanation for that?

I've seen reports that Abrams is trying to court more younger progressive voters while Warnock is trying to move more towards the middle and appeal more to those more moderate independent voters. And so that could be one reason why she's struggling.

Also, if the economy is a top issue for Georgians, I can see independent voters maybe preferring their Republican candidate, especially since Kemp again is playing into economic issues and Georgia's economic prosperity, you can say, since he's become governor.

And in regards to black men, a previous report that I read was Kemp again had that 15% support with black voters according to that one data for progress poll. And I want to really emphasize that that was one poll. And I think

This is not new. I think that was the case as well in 2018. And in 2018, some of the reports that came out after the race was settled was that black men were more focused on kind of economic issues. And they thought that the Republican candidates were playing into that more.

And I think it's possible that those same, you know, those same economic issues are in play this year. And it could be that that's really what's hurting Abrams. But black women do tend to support Democrats more than black men. So of that 15 percent, I would be interested to see a breakdown by gender to see really who's breaking for Abrams.

I think another possibility, Alex, and you kind of nodded to this in your piece that's on the site today, is that in general, candidates of color and female candidates are perceived by voters as being more liberal. There's research suggesting that going back quite a while. And if Abrams is also liberal,

leaning into more progressive positions as a way of trying to court progressive voters, as you were suggesting, then that could be hurting her among voters of color who were more conservative and Black men and Hispanic men tend to be more conservative. So that makes a lot of sense to me, actually. And, you know, just seeing some of the messages that Abrams has picked up, she's been talking a lot about abortion as an economic issue, which I think makes sense, you know,

At a high level, you think, oh, voters care about the economy. They care about abortion. Let me help them understand how these issues speak to each other. But I also think for a lot of voters, that's just like not a terribly intuitive way of thinking about abortion, even though it might really resonate with some voters. I think that's a smaller subset. And sort of as a general message, it's a little bit of a risky one. And that's a risk that Abrams has been taking. And maybe it's just not paying off for her.

To your point, Amelia, you know, Republicans have spent the past four years painting Abrams as this far left boogie woman. I think there was an article in 2018 where former President Donald Trump actually called Abrams one of the most extreme far left politicians in the entire country. But at times, too, Abrams has really struggled to find her place in the Democratic Party, I think.

She has taken more progressive stances on issues like reparations. But when she was in the Georgia State House, her record as a legislature was marked by bipartisan negotiations. So I think you kind of see that push and pull. I think both progressives and moderates have tried to claim Abrams a bit, and it's not really clear what camp she belongs to. But if you have the opposition essentially painting her as this very progressive voter and you have

more moderate voters of color, it's easy to see maybe why they might gravitate toward Kemp, both because he's touting the state's economic record, but also because he did assert his independence from Trump and voters might want to reward him for that.

Maybe the same forces that are actually like encouraging those two groups to support Abrams less. Looking at both Abrams experience this cycle and Better Works experience this cycle, I think there's been some question of like, do you do yourself harm by becoming a national figure?

Within the party, when you're trying to win an election in a, say, purple state in Georgia's circumstance, a red state in Texas's circumstance. I mean, over the four years since they both ran in 2018, Beto O'Rourke was taking positions that like, yes, I do want to take away your guns.

Basically, he was saying that when he ran for president, right? And Abrams became a star of the standard Democratic platform. She gave a response to the State of the Union address. And so sort of like tying her name and her image to the standard Democratic platform that people seem to be rebelling against in terms of the way that they're rebelling against Biden, et cetera, et cetera. Whereas like,

Warnock is running ads talking about all of the work he's done with like Tommy Tuberville in the Senate, like bipartisan legislation, things like that, trying to distance himself from the Democratic Party. Is this like an overly simplified narrative? Because I think this is something that lots of people have suggested or does it ring true?

No, I think that definitely brings up a great point. I think being a national figure, of course, helps with name ID, but it also opens you up to a lot of attacks as well. And we're seeing that with Abrams and we've seen it with O'Rourke too. With O'Rourke, as you mentioned, he did take some controversial stances when he was running for president. And I think that particularly will hurt him in Texas. But I think one of the bigger pictures is that 2018, like you said, is just not 2022. Yeah.

And the national environment is not playing in these Democrats' favor in the same way that it was four years ago. All right. Well, we will certainly be keeping close eye on Georgia. My name is Galen Druk. Emily Vanesky is in the control room. Chadwick Matlin is our editorial director. And Ben Schelfever is on video editing. You

You can get in touch by emailing us at podcast 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 a review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening and we'll see you soon.