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Can you publish a version of this podcast where it's just me saying I don't know what you're talking about for like the whole podcast? No, but we can use that as the cold open. Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk, and it's been a newsy week for elections here at home and across the pond. So on Wednesday, in her first public appearance since dropping out of the Republican primary, Nikki Haley said that she is going to vote for former President Donald Trump
this fall. When we played buy, sell, hold a couple weeks ago, the betting markets put the likelihood that Haley would endorse Trump before June at 4%. So does this count as an endorsement? Is somebody cashing in big? But of course, more importantly, endorsement or not, does this matter for the presidential election?
And lest you thought election watchers would have some downtime between now and the summer conventions, think again. Because also on Wednesday, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called for general elections to be held on July 4th. A big day for British-American relations, as you may be familiar. So we're going to indulge a little bit in some British electoral politics.
We're also going to talk about the lessons learned, a couple of the lessons learned from down ballot primaries earlier this week. And here with me to do it all is Director of Data Analytics, Elliot Morris. Welcome to the podcast, Elliot.
Hey, Galen, I'm so happy to be here. God save the king, right? I mean, as a former resident of the United Kingdom and former employee of The Economist, this must be a very exciting moment for you. I'm just happy I don't have to do one more election model. So, I mean, good luck to them.
So they're going to be modeling how many elections at once? Four billion people's worth, I believe, actually. Wow. Oh, my goodness. That wow that you just heard was senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich. How's it going, Nathaniel? Welcome to the podcast. Hey.
Hey, Galen, it's good. Yeah, that was the first thing I thought of when I saw that Haley endorsed Trump was I was like, wow, like somebody on Predict It got really rich from from choosing that 4%. So well done. Well, we've been eating a lot of crow lately on this podcast because we said that the odds of 70 something percent were too high for a debate between Trump and Biden. And
I don't actually know where we ranked 4%. Maybe we're not eating crow in this case. I think actually there were some purchases of the 4% number likelihood of Haley endorsing because it just seemed cheap. I think I held, but I actually don't remember. I'm sure some listener will correct me. But yeah, exactly. Like the chances seemed very low regardless. I agreed that the chances were very low. I thought the timing of this was weird, which I'm sure we'll talk about.
Before we go any further, this is what Haley said on Wednesday. Quote, I put my priorities on a president who's going to have the backs of our allies and hold our enemies to account who would secure the border. Trump has not been perfect on these policies. I've made that clear many, many times. But Biden has been a catastrophe. So I will be voting for Trump.
She also says, quote, Trump would be smart to reach out to the millions of people who voted for me and continue to support me and not assume that they're just going to be with him. And I genuinely hope he does. Is that an endorsement? Yes, of course it is. What do you mean? Like...
Yeah, this is a pet peeve of mine. Like when people are like, oh, like, you know, I'm supporting this candidate, but like this isn't an official endorsement. That's ridiculous. There's no such thing as an official endorsement. You don't sign a piece of paper saying I endorse so and so. Endorse is literally just a word in the dictionary that means to like publicly express support for. And Nikki Haley said she's voting for Trump. That is an endorsement.
I don't know if it's that straightforward, because think about, you know, past elections. I don't know, maybe 2016 and 2020 when we were talking about this surrounding Bernie Sanders. There's a difference between saying I am going to vote for somebody and saying you, my supporters, listen to me. I throw my support behind the nominee and I hope you do, too. And the stakes are too high in this election for you to do anything else.
So I understand that both things may be endorsements, but there's still a pretty big difference, right? If in 2020, Bernie Sanders had said Biden should probably court people who are to the left of him. I hope he does. But see you later.
I think that the party and sort of people broadly would react to that a lot differently than what he did do, which was saying the stakes are high. I'm throwing my support fully behind Joe Biden. Please join me, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Sure. I mean, there are tepid endorsements and there are full-throated endorsements. And yes, that can matter. Well, actually, I'm not sure that it does matter because I'm not sure how many people are listening to Nikki Haley talk about that. But no, but they were clearly both endorsements.
It just annoys me when candidates try to split hairs and say, like, no, I wasn't intending to endorse, which as far as I know, in fairness to Nikki Haley, she hasn't tried to quibble with that. I have dealt with other candidates and campaigns who have tried to make that quibble, and it just doesn't wash. It's just counterfactual. Right, because this is data that we actually collect in endorsement trackers, for example. And campaigns will reach out and be like, I didn't endorse. It's like, okay, well, you said you're voting for this person. The folks at, I think it was Polymarket, are cashing in.
More importantly, does this actually matter? When candidates are competing against the sort of frontrunner and ultimate nominee in a contested primary, does their endorsement of the eventual nominee change people's minds?
Yeah, we know that voters follow their opinion leaders. So I think it would be silly for us to think that nobody's listening to Nikki Haley. But I think the question in this particular case, which was so excellently answered by a very great online election news publication called FiveThirtyEight, was whether or not these people are going to be Trump supporters anyway. We found that they were less likely to be conservative and conservative
and Republicans, more likely to be Democrats, Independents, and Liberals or Moderates. 33% of them said they were conservative. Half of them were Republicans. So maybe half of them listen to her and half of them don't. And that's a wash.
So is it the voters' predisposition in terms of being moderate, conservative, or liberal? Or is it the endorsement itself that's changing folks' minds? I do think that it matters where they started. Because if you just do the math on this, maybe let's just pick some crude back-of-the-envelope math. 20% of Republican primary voters voted
were Haley voters at most. Half of those look like the type of people that would end up voting for Trump anyway. So that's, again, generously 10% of Republicans. Look, that's like five, three to 5% of the electorate in a really close election. If she's just changing the minds of 100,000 people, that could significantly matter.
i agree i think i'd put the emphasis a little bit differently i think i'd kind of shade it more toward the it matters less side of things will you be able to find a handful of voters for whom this matters or more importantly perhaps for whom they say it matters yes i'm sure those people exist but i do think the vast majority of nikki haley voters
are going to or already have made up their mind about who they're going to vote for in November, independent of this decision. Kind of as Elliot mentioned, the article that Jeffrey Skelly wrote for FiveThirtyEight found basically that about half of Haley supporters were Republicans, but half were independents or Democrats. And if you look at kind of past historical primaries and whether those voters have come home in the end, the ones who identify with their party do almost all come home in the end.
Part of that could be consolidation by the candidates being like, yes, this is my person, vote for them. But I think the Republicans who voted for Haley were probably going to vote for Trump in the end regardless. And then the Democrats and a lot of the independents who voted for Haley were really just doing that because they were already Biden voters who were voting for Haley to express their anti-Trump sentiment. Seems right.
So, Elliot, Nathaniel has convinced you that endorsements don't matter. No, I don't think that... I don't think he said endorsements don't matter. I think I said it could matter in a really close election, what she says. Yeah. I think we agree, Galen. Yeah. Stop trying to create conflict, Galen. Yeah, stop trying to drive a wedge between us. That is literally my job. Okay, so now to the more political machinations piece of this, which is...
Why did Nikki Haley do this? You know, Nikki Haley's record on Trump has really just swung back and forth for almost the entirety of his time in political public life.
And at certain points during her campaign, she very much tried to not talk about Trump and just say, "Oh, I liked his policies, but he made a lot of, you know, dramatic decisions that created chaos." Then she, at one point, started to cast herself as more than anti-Trump alternative. And now she has, after really not saying a word, made this tepid endorsement. Why?
It's a little curious. I think, I mean, I think the obvious answer for why she endorsed Trump, period, is that she probably still has presidential aspirations. She is a lifelong Republican. I don't, you know, she remains conservative. Like, I don't think she was ever going to defect to Democrats and run as a Democrat. Basically, this is this was a necessary step for her if she wants to run for president again and have a shot in 2028. That said, I think you probably got to
be a lot less tepid and more full-throated if you really want to have that inside track in 2028. I think if she wanted to do that, she should have endorsed him right away, more enthusiastically after she dropped out of the race. Even then,
might have been too late given how Trump really turned on her. Although, again, like, yeah, like you pointed out, Galen, like they've been through kind of a lot together where she was anti-Trump and then pro-Trump and then anti-Trump. And Trump has actually shown a willingness to forgive and forget if people kind of appropriately bend the knee. Doing it here in May was kind of odd because it
it was too late to really show like you were getting on board the Trump train and it's too early to really matter. Like it would have been kind of newsier if she had done this in October, right?
I do think maybe she's making a bit of a miscalculation, if I can be so bold. If she's thinking, I'm going to get on Trump's good side so I can be president after him, I can pick up the pieces. If he loses or after his term, I can be, you know, anointed or something, however the election shakes out.
then that requires two things. It requires, A, Republican voters to also forgive her for running against Trump, not just Trump's forgiveness, but the voters' forgiveness. And also requires other candidates to not beat her. So, look, I think if you want to maximize your probability of being president, then maybe you endorse Trump if you're Nikki Haley. But as to whether or not the effect on that probability is...
meaningfully non-zero, I think is somewhat up in the air. You know, we're going to get to some of the primaries later on in the podcast, but
There's been something made of the fact that Nikki Haley continues to get like 15 percent support or thereabouts in primaries where the presidential primary is clearly not actually competitive. And this idea that, well, these must be Republican voters because they're voting in a Republican primary, but they're still casting a ballot for Nikki Haley and not the former president.
Does this tell us anything than what we already know based on the polling that you suggested about the sort of conservative, moderate, liberal sort of factions within Haley's coalition? I mean, does this suggest that there is this sort of adamant anti-Trump part of the Republican Party that really just wants an alternative? Yeah.
To me, it indicates that there's a lot of Democrats and independents willing to cross and that there's some amount of Republicans who want to continue signaling that they don't like Trump and will probably, as we've discussed, most of them will probably vote for him anyway.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's important to note that it's not that unusual to have protest voting in primaries even after the nomination is basically uncontested. And in fact, Trump has been doing better in the primaries than any non-incumbent so far this century. So sure, there are a
handful of Republicans who are anti-Trump. We've known that for a long time, but they are not a significant number of the party. And yeah, they're probably not going to vote for him regardless in the fall. All right. Well, with that, let's move on to a different election, which is the British election. But first, a break.
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allotted. Now, this meant that the UK needed to hold elections by early next year, and a lot of folks were thinking that it would likely be sometime in the fall. After all, Rishi Sunak, the current prime minister, is not particularly popular, and there was some thinking that maybe there's hope that the economic picture will turn around, and you might as well wait and see if the picture will look a little rosier down the line. Of course, that has not happened.
To the surprise of many, Sunak announced that the UK is going to hold its general elections on July 4th. I imagine that he is familiar with the significance of July 4th for British-American relations, but I don't have insight into why he chose the day. What an ass.
trying to overshadow us. Yeah, that's our holiday, dude. Come on. Come on, man. I mean, hey, at least it's not like October 27th. That was going to be a nightmare. Well, I was going to say, maybe that's why he chose July 4th is he didn't want to be overshadowed by us. Right, because Rishi Sunak's a 538 reader. Yes. Now he gets his own little moment in the sun. Anyway, Ellie,
Elliot, as we mentioned, you used to live in London and you used to do forecasting for The Economist. You're somewhat familiar with British polls. What should we know about this British election that we'll dabble in over the coming six weeks?
The big thing to know is that the Tories are probably going to lose. And not only are they probably going to lose, Galen, they're probably going to get spanked. Spanked? Look, they won 371 seats out of 650 seats in Parliament last year. 632 in Great Britain and 18 elsewhere. You need 350 for a majority. The latest projections have them getting somewhere between...
150 and 200 seats, worse than Labor's performance under Jeremy Corbyn in 2019. They're projected to lose, in other words, 200 plus seats in one election.
because of how poorly they've handled the economy, cost of living crisis, immigration, or I shouldn't say how poorly they've handled it, but just because of the general conditions of the country, I don't want to ascribe too much causation to the correlation. That's the thing to know. Like, they are going to lose very badly in the popular vote unless they dramatically turn things around in six weeks. And they will likely do even worse based off of the swing in overall seats in parliament. It is a...
rousing defeat for the Tories. Yeah, and just to give some context for American readers or listeners who, like me perhaps, weren't paying very close attention to UK politics until yesterday when they announced this. The UK, they have a first-past-the-post system. They have a parliament, obviously. They don't have a president, and the prime minister is kind of the
the leader of the party that wins parliamentary control. Um, but they don't have a proportional representation system like some other parliamentary democracy. So it basically is like a, a giant house election from the U S where the speaker of the house becomes prime minister. And they have a, basically, I guess you would call it like a two and a half party system. Um, so the ruling party, uh, as, uh, as Elliot mentioned is the conservative party, also known as the Tories. That's Rishi Sunak's party. Um, labor is the main, uh,
kind of left-wing party that's led by a guy named, I'm going to mispronounce his name, Keir Starmer? You got it. Is that right, Elliot? Yeah, you nailed it. And then there are an assortment of smaller parties such as the centrist Liberal Democrats and then kind of the on the upswing Reform UK party, which is led by Nigel Farage, the like Brexit guy. They've kind of really been rising in the polls lately and now they're actually in third place in the polls. So they're kind of a like
Trumpy, more right-wing party. So that's kind of the lay of the land. And as Elliot mentioned, conservatives are far and away behind in the polls to labor right now.
We appreciate the Amerisplaining of the British election. So before we get too carried away with the polls, and I know Elliot said we're getting ready for a spanking, if people have trashed the American polls, they have absolutely spanked the British polls. Because while the American polls have had some high-profile errors over the past couple of presidential elections, British polls have historically been less accurate in some pretty high-profile ways. And so I think it's important to understand that the American polls have been less accurate
And we've talked about this on the podcast before, but one of the reasons is that demographics are a little bit less predictive of voting behavior in the UK, whereas we have such sort of well-defined divides along race, gender, education, etc. And
In the UK, they don't have as well-defined groups of people, and between those groups, things are a little more malleable. And so the swings in the electorate can be a bit bigger, and sort of predicting outcomes can be a bit harder. Elliot, understanding that, are you still sort of very confident that the Tories are headed towards a historic defeat?
Yeah, I'm pretty confident. All right. And that's the part. And then we're done. Yeah. I mean, to put some numbers on the poll error, right? Like one of the biggest poll errors was in 2015, I believe, the polls underestimated support for
The conservatives then led by David Cameron by like six percentage points on margin, three percent on vote share or so. And the reason that this is covered as such a big miss was because the election was supposed to be so close in terms of.
of both popular vote and the number of seats. But when you have these multi-party systems and they're so close to one another, you get very weird seats votes curves where one or two percentage point difference that mispredictions, differences in vote share between what you're predicting and what actually happens, can lead to huge differences, 20%
30, 50 seats in the number of seats that the party gets. So you get, not only is there a misprediction of the vote share, there's huge differences in the story that we're telling about the election and
before the election and what actually happens. Okay, so the reason this is important. So that's like a six percentage point, say, misprediction in vote margin. Right now, the vote margin between the parties is 23 percentage points. And yeah, look, maybe it'll change now that there's an election. Maybe it'll go up, but it could also go down. And regardless, if there's a six or even 12 percentage point difference in margin between the polls and what actually happens,
then labor is still very, very likely to win a majority of seats. So, like, it's just different circumstances than when previous polling errors caused meaningful predictive errors. Yeah.
look, I don't want to get in trouble. So I will say that the probabilities from the economist selection forecasting model, which I was not involved with, are about one and a half to two percent for a conservative victory. So look, if we're wrong about this, then like,
You can be really, really mean about me being wrong about a 2% probability. But that's the probability if the election were held today. So there's a little bit more uncertainty from this because things can change in six weeks. Okay, I'm going to stop rambling about probabilities now.
Okay, but that also sets us up for another interesting dynamic of British elections, which is that you don't necessarily know when they're going to happen. The prime minister has the element of surprise. And then when they do happen, this is the six-week campaign is a reminder here, long from a British perspective.
extremely short from an American perspective. So what's the difference of how a campaign is able to shift voters' minds in a six-week span as opposed to a one-year and six-month span? Does it really focus voters' attention in a much more acute way, and therefore opinion can shift quickly? Or do they see it as like the same way we see a campaign, which is that it's largely background noise until the final week or something like that?
The difference is that pollsters are really tired for a much shorter period of time. That's the difference. No, look, yeah. So public opinion can change very rapidly over the course of these elections. In 2017, in the final...
couple of months before the election, labor vote share increased 15 percentage points. That's vote share. So yeah, like you get a compressed timeline for the campaign, but that means you also compress all of the events that could act on vote preferences. Yeah, there is, you know, there is enough time for the election to meaningfully change. That is like the big caveat to any poll-based prediction at this point. There's a good amount of temporal error still.
Honestly, British elections sound fun. You know what the most fun part of it is? The way they announce the results. Yes, where even the prime minister, the person who's like the leader of the party, has to stand in a line with everyone else who's run in that—I'm going to get it wrong, it's not jurisdiction, but— Constituency.
And so that meant, for example, Theresa May ended up on a stage with somebody who was wearing like a boot on their head or something like that. Lord Buckethead. Yeah. Lord Buckethead. Yeah. It's, it's just like the best, like kind of like leveling democratic tradition. And then they, they read the results. So they don't release partial results like here in the U S they wait until all the results are counted in the constituency and then they read them out. So everybody finds out at the same time who won the entire, uh,
constituency is in. So then you don't need to like, you basically can check off that one on the map. Like it's like given all the kind of issues we have with like trust in elections and how, you know, like red surges and blue mirages and things like that here. It just is a much, I think, cleaner, more like better for like trust in the system. And it's fun with our bucket heads. So I love it.
100%. Why aren't we covering British elections? Well, we will. Did we make a mistake? Well, we will. Okay. Hey, ITV, you want to partner up? Yes, because we want to do a 538 edition of Love Island. That's why we need to partner with ITV. Who's going to...
See, Elliot doesn't even know what that is. Oh my God, Elliot. No, I know exactly what it is. I'm just going to get in trouble if I say anything with my wife. I obviously can't be a contestant. I don't understand who's going to be the contestant. Is it going to be sponsored by FiveThirtyEight? Gail and I will go on. Oh, we'll use numbers to rank. There we go. Okay. There you go. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right. Let's wrap up by talking about an election that already, or a set of elections that already happened this week, which are the primaries that took place in
in Georgia, Oregon, Idaho. You know, really exciting stuff. But we are nerdy here, so... It was exciting. We're going to talk about it. I know, I know, I know. Nathaniel's always, to pull back the curtain a little bit, needling me, like, we need to talk about these more obscure down-ballot elections. And I'm like, well, we will at some point. And this is the moment. So...
A couple things. One is that, so in Fulton County, Fannie Willis, the DA who has been prosecuting Trump, won her primary. That's no surprise. Fulton County is a very Democratic county. On the statewide level in Georgia, a conservative Supreme Court judge was reelected.
that campaign was largely about the issue of abortion. In other contexts, that has sort of swung the race towards Democrats. Clearly, this was not the case this time in Georgia. Then in Oregon, there were two pretty hotly contested House Democratic primaries there. In both, progressives lost. Are there any other things that we should shout out before we dig into why those things happened, Nathaniel? Was there a dog catcher's race in Idaho that you wanted me to talk about?
Oh, Galen, Dog Catcher's not a real office. Okay, so maybe in order of interest, one, the statewide race in a battleground state, Georgia, Supreme Court judge, conservatives did well, despite Democrats sort of trying to make it a referendum on abortion. What do you make of that?
So the conservative incumbent won 55% to 45%, so it was a pretty comfortable margin. The Democratic candidate here really tried to lean into abortion, almost to a fault. He basically said that he thought that Georgia's six-week abortion ban was illegal, and the
like judicial like ethics board basically in Georgia said hey knock it off you might rule on this if you win this election and judges are supposed to kind of take preconceived notions into their cases and he responded John Barrow the liberal candidate was basically like well I have a free speech right to say whatever I want he went to court ended up losing a court said no actually like you can't do this and he was like well I'm gonna keep talking about it anyway and then a lot of good it did him because he lost by 10 points
Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question. I think basically it shows that, you know, abortion, you can't just kind of go around and talk about abortion and expect that it's automatically going to win you Democratic votes and whip all of the Democrats into a frenzy.
I think that a few ingredients here we're missing. First is that the conservative side significantly outspent the liberal side. The kind of liberal cavalry didn't come into the rescue. This race wasn't nationalized the way that, say, the Wisconsin Supreme Court race was. I think a big part of that is the fact that control of the court.
was at stake in Wisconsin, and it was very much not here. Right now, eight of the nine justices on the Georgia Supreme Court were appointed by Republicans, and that would barely have changed. It would have been seven to two if Barrow had won. So it's not like he really would have been a big difference maker. And then also there are structural factors such as the fact that in Georgia, these races are almost never contested and incumbents haven't lost, I think, since World War II or something like that.
And in fact, on the ballot, the incumbent, like it's marked that someone is an incumbent in the race. And especially for judicial elections, which are low information, a lot of people do tend to default to the incumbent there. So, yeah, I don't think that this means that abortion isn't going to be a big issue for Democrats in the fall. I just think that means that there were other factors that neutralized the issue in this case.
Also, when you compare this to Wisconsin, I maybe took this as a piece of evidence that the Rust Belt is just more sort of ancestrally and perhaps reliably Democratic than the Sun Belt. We've seen that borne out in polling. Of course, things have been shifting. But when you're talking about low propensity elections like this and
and you have sort of a lot more ancestral Democratic voters in Wisconsin and a lot more ancestral Republican voters in Georgia, it's not necessarily surprising that you would get a result like this. And in fact, in the polls, Trump leads Biden on average by like six points in Georgia and half a point in Wisconsin. Yeah, I'm going to make a related demographics point, which is you see these projections before the Georgia race where people are like, oh...
The white non-college voters in Wisconsin and the suburban liberals or whatever joined together and elected this liberal Supreme Court justice. Maybe that could happen in Georgia as well as a way of pontificating about the –
ideological elasticity of this group, especially, and again, I'm going to harp on the white non-college voter thing, but I think this just makes a really bad overgeneralization of this group, white non-college voters. That group of people is very different in Wisconsin than in Georgia, primarily along one variable, religion. In Georgia, your white non-college voters are
by and large, evangelical white Christians. And just a lot fewer of them are that in Wisconsin. It's a more secular place. So, the ideological elasticity of the people who get elected there is going to be a function of that. And they're just like, you know, they're more conservative. They're
more, yeah, they're more Christian evangelical than in Wisconsin, where I think a lot of the liberals maybe took a little bit too much hope about like how abortion is going to play out in some of these races. Now, and that's not going to explain all of it. I think what Nathaniel's saying about incumbency and money is really important too, but that was sort of one thing I was thinking of when I was reading the coverage of this after the fact.
All right. Last thing before we wrap are the results in Oregon, where two progressive House candidates on the Democratic side went down to more moderate candidates. There was a lot of spending. Oregon has also just in general been ground zero for some of the progressive fights over policing and criminal justice, decriminalization of drugs, which was, you
you know, ultimately undone or redone, recriminalized, as you might say. So I think the question coming out of this, we've asked this plenty of times, but particularly given the sort of geographic location where these contests played out, is progressive influence waning? Is it just a real uphill battle, either in this environment or because things overall have just shifted? What do you make of it, Nathaniel?
Yeah, and I'll also note that the kind of progressive reform-minded district attorney in the Portland area, Multnomah County, also lost to a more conservative slash centrist challenger. So it definitely – there's a consistent narrative you can tell about progressives losing in Oregon the other night.
And yeah, like it's definitely not good news for them in a state like Oregon with a pretty liberal democratic electorate. You, if you hope to build kind of a lasting political organization, you need to be able to win and hold onto power in places like that. So not going to cut it. I think it's,
perfectly. It's quite plausible that this was part of a anti-progressive backlash in Oregon, which, as you mentioned, Galen, I think a lot of people you also saw in 2022, Republicans did particularly well there. This was kind of one of the places where there was like a localized red wave. So, yeah, I think like
Backlash against progressives, definitely a plausible theory. But there are also lots of confounders. So a lot of money were spent in those two House primaries. A lot of dark money groups came in and spent on behalf of the more kind of establishment-y candidates. In addition, the progressive candidate in the 5th District, Jamie McLeod Skinner, had a scandal where she was accused of basically being an abusive boss.
She ended up getting absolutely blown out in her primary, 70% to 30% against the candidate favored by National Democrats, Janelle Bynum. There are probably a lot of factors that contributed to the progressive losses. And then there's just like conditions. I mean, I'm sorry, but conditions in Portland are not good right now. It's not a great place to walk around. It hasn't been for a really long time. And empirically, right?
businesses have been leaving, complaints about safety in the city are really high. And I don't mean to be like a big downer on Portland or anything, but when you've been living in that sort of environment and rather little is changing, then you just have like a natural anti-incumbency
mindset, very similar to what's happening with inflation and economic news in the U.S. more broadly. It's hard to fight the predisposition to want to change things. And when you compare that to conditions of when Mike Schmidt won in Portland as a progressive prosecutor, the conditions then were like
perfect for a progressive DA to be elected. The current DA was retiring. It was the middle of some of the social justice movement of 2020. Is it a progressive backlash that's like once in a generation? Or did he also just happen to get in the office at the top for his sort of ideological appeal?
I think that makes sense. And this is something that we've been tracking and will continue to track. We're going to leave it there for today. So thank you, Nathaniel and Elliot. Thanks. Thanks, Galen. My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Trotavian. And our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcast.538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon. ♪
From Charleston, South Carolina.
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