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Raise your hand if you're on this call and you know what Fartgate is. It's dumb, but the acronym is funny. Wait, what's the acronym? You're talking about the House conservatives? No. Oh, are you referring to the president fart stuff? Yes. Or former president, like Trump? Okay, so there's two fart things going on. It's really funny. Okay, so Fartgate must refer to Trump.
and reporting that he had been farting when he was sitting in the courtroom. But then on the House side, House conservatives, people were really pissed at them for like voting down all these rules this week. They think they're going to get punished, right? There's all this talk about kicking them off committees and censoring them. And so they just decided they would have one conservative watch the floor. It's floor action response team. Farting is really having a political moment.
Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk, and we've got another big news week. After months of conflict over whether or how to aid United States allies abroad, the House passed a slate of bills over the weekend providing funding for Ukraine, Israel, Gazan Humanitarian Assistance, and Taiwan, and also passed a new bill that could result in a TikTok ban.
Each bill won a clear bipartisan majority, but a slim majority of Republicans opposed Ukraine aid. The bills now head to the Senate, and President Biden has indicated that he plans to sign them. So why did this happen now, and does it spell doom for House Speaker Mike Johnson?
Also, Tuesday is Election Day in one of the most pivotal states this fall. That is Pennsylvania. And of course, the presidential primary is over. But there are some competitive House primaries in the state. And we'll also take a look at the political environment overall in Pennsylvania with a little over six months until Election Day. And it is also Earth Day. So good wishes to those who celebrate. We're going to mark the day with an installment of Guess What Americans Think About Climate Change.
And lastly, lest you thought I forgot, yes, opening arguments are being heard in former President Trump's Manhattan criminal trial this morning, Monday, as we're recording, after a full slate of jurors was selected last week. In case you missed it, we talked all
Hi.
Hi, how's it going? And senior elections analyst Jeffrey Skelly. Hey, Jeff. Good morning, Galen. Good morning. All right, let's begin with those aid bills that passed the House over the weekend. So the total price tag comes to $95 billion. $95 billion.
$61 billion of that is directed to Ukraine, $26 billion for Israel and humanitarian assistance to Gaza, and $8 billion for allies in the Indo-Pacific. There's a fourth bill that is a bit of a grab bag of foreign policy that includes Russian asset seizure, sanctions against Russia, China, and Iran, and a requirement that ByteDance sell TikTok within a year or face a ban.
There is also a fifth bill in all of this, which looks like a previous bill that was passed by Republicans. It would increase security at the southern border. That bill is moving separately, and the previous iteration of it was not picked up by the Senate. So unclear what the future looks like for that. But conservative House Republicans, some of them are not happy with the state of affairs after this weekend. And Marjorie Taylor Greene has threatened a vote to vacate the speakership. So
Rachel, first of all, why did this happen now? You know, like conflict over whether or not to support Ukraine has played out for months and it kind of looked like Johnson had possibly resolved not to pass anything just a short while ago. If you would have asked me a month and a half ago if he was going to pass this bill or any assistance to Ukraine, I would have told you no.
I mean, he had very much been delaying acting on this. I mean, the White House started requesting this assistance, what, in October? The Senate did end up passing it, not until about February. But throughout all of that, Johnson was very sort of wishy-washy on Ukraine. He obviously has a very narrow majority in the House. If any one member moves to vacate him, he could potentially lose his speakership. And early on...
MAGA Republicans in the House, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, indicated that Ukraine was a red line for them. If you bring up Ukraine, we will take your gavel. And so sort of with all of that, he clearly was dragging his feet. But there was a couple of other things about why now. He said at the beginning of the year—
We'll talk about Ukraine later, but we have to deal with government funding. As you'll remember, in January, February, they kept kicking the can on all these government funding deadlines. That actually ended up taking a really, really long time. And then after that, they actually had to reauthorize this sort of foreign surveillance bill that was a huge sort of controversy within the Republican ranks. That took a full week, couple weeks, actually. And then after that...
Iran attacked Israel, and that was like the weekend before all this went down. So he didn't have any reason to delay anymore because all the legislation that had to be passed by a certain deadline was passed. Israel, obviously, needing assistance, especially in the light of, you know, being attacked by Iran.
And then his chairs, Mike Turner, the House Intelligence Committee chair, Michael McCaul, who leads the Foreign Affairs Committee. These guys were sort of like breathing down his neck, like we got to do this. Look at the intelligence. This is not just something we can let, you know, go. We can't let Putin, you know, take Ukraine. So he ended up siding with them and put this on the floor despite the threats to his speakership. And it passed.
Jeff, you looked at a breakdown of how different members of the House voted across these four bills. What did you find in terms of trends of who supported what?
Most of Congress voted for at least one of them. So it was kind of an interesting mix. You had, yeah, two-thirds, three-fourths of Democrats vote for both aid to Israel and Ukraine. I was particularly interested in that since those were their obvious intra-party splits. Republicans are split over Ukraine, Democrats over Israel.
But then you had about half of Republicans vote for both with them splitting and not – the other half not voting for the Ukraine aid, whereas the group of Democrats who split off didn't vote for the Israel aid, but all Democrats who voted voted for the Ukraine aid. And then you had this group of sort of the House Freedom Caucus types, hard right members of the GOP who were the lone bunch who didn't vote for either bill.
So that was sort of the broad breakdown. Okay, so a pretty clear majority ultimately on all of this stuff, even if it crisscrossed partisan allegiances in different ways from one bill to the next. I mean, does this match public opinion? Like, is there a clear majority for all of this stuff amongst the public? It does seem like there has been a shift back toward maybe supporting Ukraine a bit more. It actually depends on what polls you look at. In Gallup's polling back in October—
41% of Americans said the U.S. was doing too much in Ukraine, but now 36% say that and more are saying that the country isn't doing enough for Ukraine. In October, it was 25% said the country wasn't doing enough, and now 36% say the country's not doing enough. And a lot of that's Democrats. You know, this might get down to just differences between
party elites, people in Congress, and lay voters. But at the same time, this is also an issue where voters tend to get led a lot by what people in their party are saying. When the Ukraine conflict started, for instance, Republicans were reasonably supportive of helping Ukraine. But as you sort of saw earlier,
Former President Trump and other Republican leaders criticized supporting Ukraine. Over time, you saw Democrats mostly stay the same on supporting Ukraine, but Republicans over time saying that we were doing too much. That's actually a little bit of the tricky part of this is that if you're asking, like, are they doing what public opinion would support? This is an issue area where public opinion is very much driven by what political elites are saying.
I would actually argue that it's kind of the opposite on the Republican side. Like, I think maybe Trump is the exception because he's sort of been skeptical of foreign aid for a really long time. And I do think obviously the MAGA crowd listens to him and has internalized a lot of that.
But on the Republican side, I have heard from so many Republican lawmakers who are super frustrated by the direction that their party is moving in terms of like America first isolationism, not wanting to support Ukraine when they have seen classified documents suggesting that Ukraine is Putin's first stop.
Also, McConnell has talked a lot about this. Like, this was like his baby, right? Like, we are going to support Ukraine. He's really trying to convince his party that this is the right thing to do. But he's facing, like, a backlash in the base. I mean, Republican voters are increasingly skeptical. So I kind of wonder if it's actually the opposite on the GOP side, where they are starting to hear from a base and then get the pressure from the base.
to like, you know, take care of the border, don't spend money abroad, and that it's sort of being internalized by some of these lawmakers. Yeah, I mean, I think that speaks to the influence of Trump and how he is just much more influential. Than Mitch McConnell? Oh, yeah. Don't say. Breaking news, folks. And then just to like touch on the Israel side of this, because we were talking about Ukraine.
It seems like polling has moved in a direction where Americans are generally more supportive of, say, a ceasefire than they were before. Republicans are still overwhelmingly supportive of Israel, but Democrats and even independents are either more supportive of Palestinians or just more critical of Israel, sort of depending on how a question was worded.
We've seen the Biden administration sort of shift in that direction, try to maybe encourage Israel to back off. But at the same time, in the wake of Iran attacking Israel, you do see polling that suggests that Americans support helping Israel and support Israel taking action and the U.S. supporting Israel in those actions. And actually, there's even some polling that suggests that
Republicans, a bit more than others, would even support the U.S. taking direct military action against Iran as a part of that. But that's, to be clear, is not the majority position. It seems like
But if you sort of take that and people saying we should support Israel's actions but not act directly as a part of this, that group is like a majority of respondents nationally. So this is from some CBS News, YouGov polling. So aiding Israel is in and of itself important.
is not opposed by the public it's just there's a lot of nuance because of what's going on in terms of like a humanitarian crisis and especially democrats attitudes toward that which is why you saw a bit of a split among democrats at least a fifth of democrats voted against the foreign aid bill for israel and clearly that's because of the nature of the conflict in gaza
At this point, is this a done deal? I know that the House was really the holdup for Ukraine assistance, but the way that they've gone about this is a little bit different than how the Senate would have gone about this originally. Do we just expect these House bills are going to sail through the Senate and Joe Biden will sign them as is, including even the TikTok ban, which we had a big debate over a couple months ago?
Yeah, it's going to pass the Senate. I will say, like, when this bill came out and Johnson sort of rolled it out, I called a bunch of senior Dems. The White House was refusing to weigh in. Like, the entire night, they wouldn't weigh in. Well, because they didn't want to sour it, right? They didn't want to be like, well, if the White House is, like, jumping to support these bills, then they must be bad, and Republicans probably shouldn't support them. In hindsight, yes. But at the time, I thought maybe they were considering what their position would be. But, like, all
All the senior dumbs I talked to the night after he rolled this out were like, this is the Senate bill just broken up with a little bit of something on the side. And yes, I mean, they're going to swallow the TikTok ban. And I think that that was actually a pretty smart move on Johnson's part. A smart move on Johnson's part, as our conversation from earlier just keeps coming back to my brain, to jam that in, because otherwise we might not have seen the Senate move
the Senate Commerce Chair, Maria Cantwell, really doesn't like the House TikTok bill and was out there like saying she didn't want to take it up and all this stuff. And there was some question about whether the Senate would really do anything. But Johnson sort of putting it in this must pass bill that Democrats really want. He's getting a pretty big win on the TikTok ban. So in the White House, we'll sign it. Well, the win they're not getting is on
On the border. I mean, Johnson said pretty clearly, we're not moving to assist our allies, you know, protect their borders until we protect our border. And unless we do it together or we do it together. And of course, we had many conversations at the beginning of this year about how that bipartisan bill was a no-go. They do now have this fifth bill, which reflects H.R. 2 for the most part, I think.
that would beef up security, do a lot of conservative priorities surrounding the southern border. Is that dead on arrival in the Senate? Like, is there any hope for the House and Senate to come to an agreement on doing something about the migrant crisis before the election?
No, ignore it. Not going to happen. Not going to happen. That ship has sailed when Republicans killed the bipartisan border deal in the Senate. Well, and in response, Biden had been talking an awful lot about executive action and taking moves that would severely limit asylum seekers at the southern border and take some of the moves that were in that bill and do them unilaterally. But
But recently, he's gone pretty quiet. Do we still expect those executive actions to be forthcoming? Like, what's going on there? So the read I've gotten on that is that he's waiting until there's another big crisis at the border. The numbers so far, at least last time I checked, were much lower than the administration was anticipating for the spring. Like, usually when the weather warms up, you see a lot of migrants head to the border. There was anticipation that
they would reach the more than 100,000 migrants a month like they had in December, but they haven't. And so the thinking amongst Dems I've talked to is that they're waiting to do anything until there's like,
you know, they can get some credit for it, which sounds really bad, but politics is politics. But as for executive action, I know that Joe Biden actually called Speaker Johnson, like, right when Johnson rolled out his bill, and they got in a little bit of a tiff about, you know, what they were going to do. And, you know,
Johnson basically pressed Biden and was like, if you would do an executive order, at least it would really help me. And it's interesting that Biden has chosen not to because, from my understanding, the White House doesn't want him to lose his speakership, even though there's a good chance that he might. But Johnson was basically pleading with Biden to do executive action last week, and Biden has done nothing.
And that gets us to our final question on this topic, which is now that this is all said and done and Mike Johnson has pissed off more than a few House Republicans, what does his future look like?
It's really hard to predict for a number of reasons. I kind of feel like the fact that Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tom Massey, who, yes, he's a kind of gadfly libertarian conservative who's always been a pain in the ass for leadership, but he doesn't normally speak out like this. Like, he wasn't one of the members trying to oust Kevin McCarthy. The fact that he is, like, really pushing this and they now have a third person, like,
It's really hard for me to see them backing off. Some people think these are like, you know, just threats that they're like not really going to do anything. But I Massey told me last week that there's going to be this sort of slow drumbeat of members who come out and call for him to resign and that he hopes that by the time about a dozen conservatives come out, that Johnson will resign on his own. And Johnson has said he's not going to do that.
And then, of course, you can talk about, like, will Democrats save Johnson's speakership?
And I have always felt that if they do, which I think that they could, and I think that they would, they're saying they would, politically, it seems very untenable from my perspective, because I think a bunch of Republicans after that will say, you're now Democrat speaker. Like, we cannot possibly have you running a Republican majority. More people will come out against him. We could see weekly motions to vacate. I think it could get very messy very fast unless Donald Trump...
you know, steps in and says, Marjorie Taylor Greene, no, like put down your sword. Like Trump is going to have to be very active in batting back these people who are MAGA, like loyalists for him. And so far he hasn't quite been that forceful. So it's hard for me to see it not happening, but
Who knows? I mean, it's really hard to predict. Yeah, that line about him basically being a Democrat speaker if the Dems come to his rescue. I mean, Marjorie Taylor Greene is already like setting up that playbook with her talking on Fox on the weekend saying that he's working for the Democrats and, you know, he's basically a lame duck as far as we're concerned. We're just asking him to resign and hoping that he'll agree to do so.
And yeah, I mean, Trump is really kind of the only X factor, as he often is here, where if he does come out strongly, that could sway things. But as you mentioned, he hasn't really like what was it like a week and a half ago? The speaker was in Mar-a-Lago and they had their little like side by side photo op. And he said, I stand with the speaker. Right. Yeah. He said, I stand with the speaker. But like even that was not that like.
I don't know. It could have gone further. Like, that's kind of like as much as he would say. Oh, for sure. And then since then, he's been really kind of outside of court. He was like saying, you know, oh, yeah, he's a good guy. We'll see what happens. Like, it's not... That's not what you want to hear. We'll see what happens. If you're the speaker right now. Tom Massey, one of the rebels trying to push him out, specifically mentioned that comment. We'll see what happens. And he's like, yeah, well, he...
My understanding is that he's not taking a position on this, which is a different read than I got from Trump's inner circle, you know, just a few days before that, which was that they were pissed at Marjorie Taylor Greene and they wanted her to back down. But he's like you mentioned, he's starting to be like, oh, OK, maybe this is going to happen. So I shouldn't lean in too hard and like kind of back off. Well, presumably Trump is in a
tricky spot a little bit because it's his biggest supporters who are taking issue with Mike Johnson. And of course, voters can differentiate between Trump and congressional Republicans, and they very much do. But in an election year where Trump ideally wants, probably wants the Republican brand to look as good as possible to voters, another sort of like seemingly back-to-back vacation, vacation, is that the noun? Yeah.
I'll take one of those right now. Please. I think a motion to vacate is the opposite of a vacation for the journalist covering it. Unless you're the speaker because then you can leave town. So,
So it's an interesting dynamic where back in 2020, Biden was running ahead of congressional Democrats, which is to say that Trump was running behind congressional Republicans. Like the Republican brand was better than Trump's brand. And as a result, you saw Republicans overperform in some of the places where he still overperformed Trump in some of the places where he still lost and vice versa. It was sort of that edge that Biden had over the rest of the Democratic Party.
that may have given him the presidency, while in the current state of affairs, actually, Democrats are running ahead of Biden. Congressional Democrats are running slightly ahead of Biden. And Trump...
is running slightly ahead of congressional Republicans. Now, if the Republican brand is really tarnished, especially if more of a mess ensues, maybe that gap will just open further and Trump will continue to be more popular than the Republican brand overall. But nonetheless, it's not ideal for his party to be making a mess of things or seemingly not able to govern in an election year.
There's no precedent, as far as I can recall, for the situation Johnson is in right now and that he's got a one seat majority. He could lose one vote right now, given that the retirements, it was already a slim majority to begin with. Even Nancy Pelosi had trouble controlling her majority last Congress. And what was it like a five or six? And that's Nancy Pelosi. Like she is known for her iron whip of her members. Mike Johnson, you know, she's a big fan of her.
narrow majority and this new sort of faction in the Republican Party that just...
you know, doesn't give a damn what leadership says. Like they follow, you know, the MAGA world and leadership isn't always aligned with the MAGA world. In fact, frequently is not. And so like Republicans, they're not falling in line anymore. So that narrow majority becomes even harder. So a lot of Republicans will argue on the Hill. I would say a majority of them that he's doing what he has to do, that if he wants to fund the government, if he wants to ensure Pfizer got reauthorized, if he wants to, you know, pass Ukraine funding, he has no other choice because,
He can't do anything with his own members because they can't agree on what to do. So that's sort of the argument for him. Now, will it trickle down to the base? Heck no. I mean, the base doesn't care. Like, the GOP base is going to be—is already furious at him. So, like, that's why I think there's a real good possibility that he's not going to be speaker much longer, but we'll see. Well, speaking of slim majorities in the House, let's move on to Election Day in Pennsylvania.
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Pennsylvania's primaries are on Tuesday, and while that's plenty exciting for election nerds, Pennsylvania's role in the general election this fall probably has more universal appeal. So we're going to talk about both. The primary competition in the primary is on the House side, so we're going to dig into that. Then we can talk about the Senate and presidential election. But let's begin in the 12th congressional district, which is featuring...
Another intraparty conflict, but within the Democratic Party. So it is a center-left versus progressive-left primary with the Israel-Hamas war featured prominently. Currently in the seat is Representative Summer Lee, who's a member of the squad. Jeff, how vulnerable is Lee? And what are the attack points from the center-left on this?
Lee is reasonably vulnerable in the sense that when she won this seat in 2022 in the primary, she won actually by less than one percentage point. And that was with like 42 percent of the vote in what was basically a three-way race. So in theory, there could be a majority of voters to win over in a primary to vote against her. So she's facing Bhavani Patel,
who is a council member for one of the small communities around Pittsburgh. And she actually was going to run for that seat in 2022, but then dropped out as the field got crowded. But now she is, it's one-on-one, it's just the two of them. And she's been basically questioning her Lee's sort of democratic bona fides.
For instance, she's run ads attacking Lee for failing to support the Biden administration. She's criticized Lee's support for the uncommitted movement in the Democratic presidential primary, mostly just trying to say Lee is not a good Democrat, which is
In theory, it could be a strong message in a Democratic primary, especially in Pennsylvania, a closed primary state where you will only – you'll have registered Democrats voting and no one else. At the same time, Lee has a lot more money than Patel, and even though Patel has gotten some outside support, there's sort of this like –
reject AIPAC coalition that's come together that has helped fund outside spending on Lee's behalf as well. The question of Israel within the Democratic Party on that vote we were just talking about, one-fifth of Democrats voted against the foreign aid bill for Israel and Lee was among them. And so the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has sort of been looming as this threat to those kinds of members because their super PACs
might spend many millions of dollars to try to oust some of these members. But interestingly, AIPAC has not ended up spending in this race, or at least had not when I last checked as of Friday, which was a bit of a surprise because they spent millions against Lee actually in 2022, but haven't this time. But nonetheless, that's sort of the situation. I think Lee is probably a moderate favorite to win renomination, but you can't rule out the possibility that she could lose.
Rachel, what's the sense of in the House how vulnerable this group of progressives is? Members of the squad and others have been primaried for several cycles now, and it seems like most of the primaries haven't done particularly well. So is there a sense that, you know, we're here to stay, we're a feature of the Democratic caucus now? How often do they get in line versus sort of cause problems for the Democratic caucus overall?
If I was Summer Lee and I'm facing a primary right now,
Given the atmosphere, she's in a pretty good position compared to what she could have been, like, you know, in a different cycle. The Democratic Party, a lot of people are upset with the Biden administration and how they've handled the situation in Gaza. There are a lot of Democrats who are not super jazzed about Biden. They'll vote for him, but they're not super in love with him. And so the fact that she's putting the uncommitted sort of thing around her
you know, shoulders. I guess, like, I'm surprised that she's as vulnerable as she is. But in another cycle, she would probably be way more vulnerable. These things, I think, would actually help with some voters, depending on the district, of course. This is a Biden plus 20 district for what it's worth, so. Yeah, a lot of Dems in there. The power of progressives, I think, has definitely grown over the past few Congresses. I mean, I'm thinking back to, like, Biden's first two years in office and, like,
all the problems the progressives caused for him, but also how successful they were in getting the Biden White House to embrace priorities that I never would have guessed Biden would ever embrace, like, you know, student loan forgiveness, some of the, like, social welfare stuff that he had originally proposed, which a lot of it didn't end up passing, but, like, he tried. They tried.
So I feel like progressives have certainly grown in power. There are a number of prominent progressives, though, who are part of the squad who have various scandals surrounding them that I think that make them vulnerable, right? Like, but I don't think that's the progressive brand becoming more vulnerable. I think it's more like...
You know, so-and-so pulling a fire alarm or another, you know, progressive like hiring her boyfriend, husband or whoever he is. Yeah, paying a ton of money to this person for, you know, which is like clearly a conflict of interest and looks bad.
As we move on down the list of districts, we also have the 7th District, which Democrat Susan Wild won by just two points and so is defending this cycle. And also the 10th District, where Republican Scott Perry won by eight points, so a little bit less competitive, but still
defending. And of course, we just talked about how close the House is. So every House district that's moderately competitive is going to be a battleground. Kayleigh, how are things looking in the 7th District? Yeah, I mean, this is one that's going to be extremely competitive, not just for Pennsylvania, but anywhere in the country, come the general. So there's three main candidates that are running on the GOP side. We've got Kevin Delacour, who was the runner-up in the GOP primary in 2022.
Maria Montero, she's an attorney and the director of public affairs for the Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority in Philly. They're squaring off against Ryan McKenzie, who's a state rep. Deliker actually is kind of leading in fundraising, but the Koch brothers PAC has been backing McKenzie. So he's got a lot of spending on his behalf in that race.
But there hasn't been any polling on it. So it looks pretty competitive. It'll be interesting to see who comes out on top and will be heading off against Wild come the fall. Like I said, it's going to be one of the most competitive races for the House this election season. So can we talk a little bit about the overall environment in Pennsylvania? It seems like looking nationally, things have moved slightly in Biden's direction since the beginning of March. It also seems like
overall, like the upper Midwest. And I know that people don't want to include Pennsylvania in the Midwest, and it's not part of the Midwest, but it maybe shares a cultural and political affinity. We won't have this debate now, but a political and cultural affinity with other Midwestern states like Michigan or Wisconsin or Ohio. It seems like Biden is holding up better in those places than he is in the Sunbelt, like
Georgia and Arizona and Nevada, at least for now. So, you know, where does this put Pennsylvania in the race for the Senate, the House and the presidency at this point? Like, are we talking about tipping point state Pennsylvania come this fall? I would say that there is a perfectly reasonable chance that Pennsylvania will
will be the tipping point state again. It's been close to that or in that position the last couple of elections involving Trump. If I recall off the top of my head, it was the... It would have been Trump's tipping point state in 2020 had he been able to win in some other states, whereas Wisconsin, I think, is what clinched Biden the win in 2020. But the point is it was like one of the closest states, closer to the national result, and...
Biden won by like two statewide. So it's going to be a close race for everything is, I think, a straightforward way of looking at it. And if you're thinking about a district like the 7th District, that's one that Biden would have carried by less than a point in 2020 under the current lines.
And then there's also the 8th district next door, which actually Trump carried, that Democrats hold but could obviously flip under the right circumstances for the GOP. Add in the Senate race, where you have Bob Casey defending. He's – gosh, he's at this point, what, 2006, 12, 18? He's going for his fourth term.
He seems relatively popular, and so maybe he's in a position to run a little ahead of Biden, but I don't think there's much reason to think that he would run very far ahead of Biden, not in our very polarized, mostly straight-ticket age. I think there's every reason to expect just a ton of competition in Pennsylvania. I think the conventional wisdom that I've heard repeated but feels a little...
ill-supported at this point is that both chambers are going to flip this fall, that Democrats are liable to win the House and Republicans are liable to win the Senate. Is that something that people should be putting any confidence in at this point? I would say the Republicans flipping the Senate is more likely of those two. I'd say the House is much more difficult to say. Yeah, I think the House is still a big question mark because it's such a slim margin that you're talking about there.
And all of so many of these races that are up for grabs for either flipping or holding on to seats are also so close that it's really hard to make those calculations at this stage. That's not to say the Senate is some sort of done deal for the GOP. It's just that they have a very clear pattern.
And it's winning the three red state seats that Democrats currently hold that are up. That they're trying to defend, yeah. So Ohio, Montana, and then West Virginia. West Virginia is now all but certain to flip since Joe Manchin retired. But those three would give Republicans 51 seats. That's all they need. Yeah. Well, but Tester and Brown are some really strong candidates. I mean, I would say Brown and Ohio is probably—
probably the more vulnerable. But he's got this really strange brand where, you know, he's like a progressive, but like also pulls in some independent. I mean, his brand is interesting. Tester, I feel like is, I haven't seen his polling in Montana in a while, but I'm pretty sure he's pretty popular there. It's interesting that you guys say the Senate is more likely to flip
And definitely the feeling on the Hill when you talk to people is that the house is more likely to flip. But again, that's not necessarily based on, you know, it could just be a gut whatever, not based on an empirical anything, Galen. As you mentioned, it's vibes, right?
Republicans think that they're screwing things up right now. And so they a lot of them are telling me they are not expecting to be in the majority next year. So, well, that's that's what's so funny, right, is because the top of the ticket, the presidency and the House popular vote and ultimately, you know, who ends up controlling the House are so linked. I think that in 2020, there were only something like 16 districts that split their vote between House and presidency.
And so as much as people may feel like the House has gone off the rails on Republicans' watch, people also feel like the country has gone off the rails under Biden's watch. And, you know,
the top of the ticket is going to have ultimately more influence on the House than the House is going to have influence on the top of the ticket. And so if ultimately Trump wins the presidency, it would actually surprise me if Trump won the presidency and Democrats... I don't know. No, that's going too far. It wouldn't surprise me. But if Trump wins the presidency...
which I think also the conventional wisdom in Washington has been that Trump is going to win the presidency. So it strikes me as odd that the conventional wisdom would also be that Democrats are going to win the House. You would expect both of those things to move in the same direction just because of how the decline that we've seen in split-ticket voting and how those generally move in the same direction. But again, the caveat that we always cite on this podcast, which is that in super close elections, it's easier for weird things to happen. And if, you know,
Trump is running just two points ahead of Republicans in the House, that two points could be the difference between Trump winning the presidency and Democrats winning the House or something like that. And of course, the House is more reactive to the popular vote than the presidency because of the Electoral College.
Democrats in the Senate, it's 51-49. So all Republicans need, if Trump were to win the presidency, is one seat. And they will have that with West Virginia. So then it's a question of
Well, are Republicans able to pick up Ohio or Montana? And are Democrats able to make inroads somewhere where we currently would rate them as underdogs like a Texas or even maybe Florida? Those are basically the only two states in the realm of possibility for Democrats to play offense in. And everywhere else is about Democrats playing defense in places like Wisconsin and Arizona and Nevada. I mean these are all places that are going to be tough battles for the Democrats to hold on to the seats that they already control.
If you include Arizona where Kyrsten Sinema, of course, has become an independent and is not running again but is still functionally a democrat. So the other thing there is that Senate and presidential results are pretty aligned these days too. So that's the real challenge for Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Jon Tester in Montana is that, what, '33 or '34 I think in 2020 went the same direction for president and senate and the only one was Susan Collins.
who won even though Biden carried Maine. And in 2016, all the seats went the same way for president and Senate. So, you know, it's just not a lot of split ticket voting. And so that's a real problem. Now, I do think Tester is somebody who's got smaller states tend to be a bit more winnable in this way because people can really build personal brands and
There's just like a small state thing that seems to help out people from the opposite party. I think that's part of why Manchin has survived. Brown has a tougher time in a state like Ohio. It's going to be – he's going to need to win over people who are going to vote for Trump. That's true for Tester too, but Tester is just –
done a good job of having kind of this brand that seems to win over some people in Montana. So I do actually kind of agree that I would weirdly rank Tester as more likely to win than Brown again. But we'll just have to see. It's all about cutting against people's expectations, right? Like,
Jon Tester is well known to be a farmer in Montana. Look, he's missing what? He's missing the finger. He's missing what? These two fingers, I think. Was that a tractor accident? Yeah, when he was like a teenager or something. And so in a world where the parties are so well defined by these things like race,
rural voters are Republican, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Jon Tester, as a well-known farmer who has a biography that is intertwined with that identity, can really cut against expectations and stereotypes, and that is how you win a sort of
bipartisan majority in American politics. It's hard to do, and oftentimes the base demands that you don't. But when you can do it in the rare situations where you can, that is like the most obvious way to be broadly popular in American politics. That's the secret sauce. Secret sauce. Secret sauce, but really, really hard one to mix, right? Yeah. Okay, let's move on and celebrate Earth Day.
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To mark Earth Day, we are going to play a round of Guess What Americans Think About Climate Change. So grab your pen and paper and get ready. This is an interesting one because it's more specific. I'm hoping that you'll all be on a pretty even playing field, and I'm excited to see where things go. So without further ado...
One, what percentage of Americans feel it is extremely important to observe Earth Day each year? Extremely important. And I do need to add some context here, which is that the responses, I don't know if this is a good use of polling, but the responses were extremely important, very important. Not a good use of polling. Somewhat important, not too important, or not important at all.
And what does it mean to observe Earth Day? To plant a bunch of trees?
That is a great question. So I guess we are now transforming this segment into good or bad use of polling. Despite the fact that this is a bad use of polling from Big Village, what percentage of Americans say that it is extremely important to observe Earth Day? And maybe this is a proxy for people who feel very environmentalist.
All right, three, two, one, reveal. Okay, we got 11% from Jeffrey, 7% from Kaylee, and 35% from Rachel.
It goes to Jeffrey. I honestly thought maybe it was going to be a weird one, and people just say like, oh, of course I absurd. It's extremely important to me. No one was close. You get it, but you're not that close. It's 21% who say it's extremely important to celebrate Earth Day. So I just won for Jeffrey. Next question. This is like the yin to that question's yang.
What percentage of Americans agreed that climate change is beyond our control? It's too late to do anything about it. That's so depressing. That's interesting because, like, a lot of Dems want to do something about it, right? But then a lot of Republicans don't believe it. So this has got to be a pretty small... No hints. No hints. I'm not giving any hints here. All right. Three... Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Two... I think I'm going to change mine. One...
One and a half. Okay, okay. Reveal. Okay, we got Jeffrey said 31%, Kaylee said 12%, and Rachel said 3%. It goes to Kaylee. The answer is 20%. It's still not very close. 20% of Americans said that climate change is beyond our control. It's too late to do anything about it. One in five Americans are...
or that? Yeah, I actually started to back off. I wrote 31 down and was like, man, I wonder if that was high. And I was thinking maybe, but I was like, I got to stick with it. First instinct, you know? As Rachel suggested, this is maybe an interesting cross-section of people politically. This was an Ipsos project
poll that was done of the globe. So the United States was one of 33 countries asked this question. I don't have the crosstab, so I can't tell you what percentage of those people are Democrats or Republicans, but the 33 country average is 25% of people in the 33 countries surveyed say that climate change is beyond our control. It's too late to do anything about it.
The country that ranked number one was India. 67% of Indians said that climate change is beyond our control. It's too late to do anything about it.
I do not have the political expertise, the global political expertise to explain why that is. I just thought it was interesting. You're not going to start telling us what is the BJP Modi's party? You're not going to try to dissect Indian politics a little bit here? Just you wait. I think we are going to cover the Indian election once we get into June in case people hadn't heard, which I hadn't heard at the beginning of this year. More people are going to vote.
this year in 2024 than in the history of the world. A lot of elections. A lot of elections. So it's something of a celebration for democracy. A lot of those elections will not be free and fair, though. So we'll get into that at a later date. But next question.
which generation was most likely to feel that climate change is beyond our control. It's too late to do anything about it. The options are boomer, Gen X, millennial, Gen Z. No silent generation in this poll. Okay, three, two, one, reveal.
Okay, Jeffrey says Gen X. I said Millennials. Kaylee says Gen Z, and Rachel says Millennials, and Rachel gets it. It's Millennials. Millennials are the most likely to feel that climate change is out of our control at this point, and that also means that you each have a point. I'm loving this.
That's awesome. That would suggest that you probably have a strange coalition of people saying yes to that who are either conservative Republicans who, A, don't believe in climate change or think – or would answer the question as like, yeah, climate change is real, but it's like a natural thing that's happening and whatnot. Yeah.
And a group of like more liberal, like Democrat or lean left who are cynical or basically like it's too late to fix the situation. We've screwed everything up. We've done so bad. I would be lying to that. There's more of that than the former in our age category. Well, baby boomers were the least likely to feel this way.
Gen Z, the optimism maybe kicks in for the younger generation because then it's a dip down for Gen Z. Hasn't been burned out of them yet by reality, you know? Okay. Moving on. What percentage of Americans say that tax credits for individuals to add solar panels to their homes have helped people like them? Oh. Okay.
Probably not a lot. People like them, though. People might have more, like, even if they haven't personally, they might be like, oh, but I'm sure other people. Yeah. This is an interesting one. I think it's kind of like, do you see people in your community doing this? Right. Is maybe what the question gets at. Three, two, one, reveal.
Kaylee and I are pretty close. Kaylee is at 8%. Rachel is at 9%. And Jeffrey is at 38%. And the answer is 26%. So Jeffrey gets that one. Wow, that's really high. I think there's... Jeffrey's cheating over there. No, I was still a third above the answer. No, I think I could imagine this as a combination of the people like you aspect of it and also...
Some liberal, progressive people responding being like, it's almost like saying like, oh yeah, of course it's helping. Of course. That's a good read. That's interesting. They're like sort of cued to be like, oh yeah, this is a thing that I would want to be true. So I will definitely say yes. That actually makes a lot of sense. Expressive responding is what we like to call that. The policy is so strange because you have to make enough money to be able to afford a home. Yeah.
But if you make too much money, then you no longer qualify for the rebate. So I feel like it's kind of actually a narrow group of people that are actually helped by it. All right. Well, moving on. Jeffrey, you have two points. Kaylee, one. Rachel, one. What percentage of Americans say they are concerned about air pollution where they live?
Is it like somewhat plus very concerned? Yeah, it's very or fairly concerned. And this is from Gallup. So it combines those two. Yeah, very or fairly concerned about air pollution where you live. All right. I just changed my answer like three times. All right. Three, two, one, reveal. Ooh, we have 46% from Jeff.
40% from Kaylee and 65% from Rachel. Kaylee gets it, and this is the first in this game. It is exactly 40% of the room to say that they are concerned about air pollution. I'm curious, Kaylee, where did the 40% come from, if not a wild guess?
So my understanding is that a lot of people that don't believe in climate change do still believe in pollution, like they think and think it's a bad thing. So that kind of like gets rid of the partisanship. And I was literally just thinking, trying to think of like how many people live in or near some kind of city. Because if you live out in rural areas, you're probably not as concerned. It's less in your face.
Interesting, interesting. I'll say they also do a racial breakdown in this Gallup poll. And even when controlling for whether you live in a rural area,
urban, or suburban area, concerns about air pollution are significantly higher amongst Black and Hispanic adults. In fact, on that question, the air pollution question, there's a 20-point gap between White and Black respondents. Interesting. Our next question is, what percentage of Americans trust Donald Trump to address climate change?
All right. Three, two, one, reveal. Okay. We have 37% from Jeffrey, 15% from Kayleigh, and 20% from Rachel. And Jeffrey gets it. It is 33% of Americans who trust Donald Trump to address climate change. Basically his base, right? That's why I was like 37%. I was like,
All right. So like a bunch of Republicans and hardly anyone else. So 37 percent. Well done. OK, final question for this Earth Day. When asked who should take the lead in mitigating or reducing the effects of climate change, what percentage of Americans said the government?
Wait, how was the question? Like, did they have a list of options to choose from or was it open ended? In your opinion, who should be taking the lead on mitigating or reducing the effects of climate change?
government, the United Nations, everyday people, companies, scientific educational institutions, nonprofit or environmental organizations. And then they also broke down the federal government and state and local governments. Is this a select all that apply? It's select all that apply. Yes. Okay. So they can select more than one for sure. That's important. Yeah, it is. Okay. I'll tell you what.
A lot of people had varying opinions on this. The United Nations does not appear very popular amongst Americans for solving climate change. 33% of Americans said the United Nations should be taking the lead on mitigating or reducing the effects of climate change. Okay, so three, two, one, reveal.
86% from Kaylee, 45% from Rachel, and 48% from Jeffrey. It is 70%. Wow, that means some Republicans too. That's fascinating. So Jeffrey, you had three points. Kaylee, two. Rachel, one. Great game, everyone. The real winner on this Earth Day is the Earth. So congratulations to the Earth. Your trophy is in the mail.
And thank you everyone so much for joining me today. Thank you, Jeff, Kaylee, and Rachel. Thanks for having me. Thank you, Galen. Yep. Bye. My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Chertavian. And our intern is Jayla Everett. Jesse Dumontino is on video editing. 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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