Trump's Primary Challengers Are Running Out of Time 01:07:01

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Did y'all hear that? Oh my God. Was that you, Elliot? This is the first time this has happened to me because it's usually downstairs. Oh, sure, sure. Apparently your Google speaker doesn't think you wash your hands enough. Elliot, wash your hands before lunch. In Washington this week, we are all reminded we should be washing our hands more. Gross. Hello and welcome to the Five for the A Politics podcast. I'm Galen Drew.

A very special happy Monday to Senator Ben Cardin's office. I'm sure it was a very long weekend, but I am going to be a grown up and hold back on any puns or innuendos, or at least I will try. So here we go. The US House adjourned for the holidays last week after voting along party lines to authorize an impeachment inquiry into President Biden.

The Senate is delaying its holiday recess as negotiators try to hash out a deal that would include aid to Ukraine and Israel, as well as funding for border security and possible changes to asylum law. We're going to talk about the impeachment inquiry and that possible grand bargain and, more to the point, what Americans think about it.

Also, last Friday marked exactly one month until the Iowa caucuses. So get ready. We're going to take a look at what the data says about how much the polls have historically moved during the final stretch before the early states and whether any of the high profile endorsements of late actually mattered.

And we're going to wrap up by taking stock of how likely Americans were to turn out to vote in 2023. Since Trump was elected in 2016, we've been in an era of historically high turnout elections. So did that continue this year?

And does that portend anything for next year? You're going to have to stick around to find out the answer to both of those questions. Here with me to discuss it all is politics reporter Leah Skarnam. Welcome to the podcast, Leah. Hi, thanks for having me. Also here with us is director of data analytics, Elliot Morris. Welcome to the pod, Elliot. Hey, Galen. Nice to see your shining face again.

Are you referring to the moisturizer that I put on my face? You look great, but I should have said beaming because you're so happy. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for noticing, Elliot. And also here with us is dear friend of the podcast and Atlanta Journal-Constitution Washington correspondent, Tia Mitchell. Welcome to the pod, Tia. It's great to be back on this Ben Cardin Monday. Okay.

Indeed, indeed it is. We'll see how much of our pre-podcast conversation makes it into the cold open. You can just imagine, listeners at home, that the conversation was significantly longer than whatever 15 to 30 second clip ends up in that spot. But we have bosses, and so it won't make it into the main part of the podcast.

We are going to begin by focusing on Congress, though, the other things that have been happening in that building over the past week or so. And so first and foremost, the negotiations. Senate Democrats initially proposed a more than $110 billion package with aid to Ukraine and Israel, funding for border security, as I mentioned, as well as some other national security initiatives.

Republicans rejected it because it didn't include any changes to asylum law that might address the record high number of migrant crossings at the southern border. But it now appears that Democrats are considering making such changes to get the law through. Tia, where do negotiations currently stand after a weekend where the key negotiators stuck around Washington?

So from what we can tell, there is progress, but there's nothing close to an agreement, let alone actual bill text that can be brought to the floor. So while it's encouraging on some aspects that they're continuing to talk, it seems that there's, you know, there's one Republican, one Democrat and one Independent.

that create this poor group of negotiators. And they're still coming to the table, they're meeting, they're bringing in the White House and, you know, stakeholders with Homeland Security and things like that. So they're working on it, but they still seem to be quite a ways from actually having something to vote on. And really, there's no time left, to be honest.

There's no time left to do it before the holidays or there's no time left to get bill text and pass this in the coming months period. Yeah, to get it in before the holidays. You know, the House is already gone. They're not back until January 9th. And there's no indication that Speaker Mike Johnson would bring them back, even if the Senate does vote on legislation. But it's really hard for the Senate to move fast unless they have unanimous consent.

And something as contentious as border security policy, it's going to be really hard for all 100 senators to say, yes, I like this enough to say, vote on it quickly, which means it's unlikely even if there's bill text soon, it's really unlikely that the Senate will vote. Not impossible.

But it just doesn't seem like there will actually be votes on something before the holiday break. And then when they come back, they've got so many other things to do, including a mid-January government shutdown deadline that they're still...

a big uphill kind of battle just to get some type of border security measure that can open up the door for Ukraine funding to a vote in the short term. Yeah. Tia, what kinds of concessions are Democrats or the White House open to making on immigration?

So again, we're speculating because there's nothing kind of written, but it seems like Democrats are open to new policies that can make it easier to kick people out of the United States, remove them from the United States if they're seeking asylum while they're pending consideration of their application, basically telling them, leave the United States and we'll let you know if you're able to come back.

Also changes as to, you know, right now we allow people to come to the U.S. and seek asylum instead of requiring them to kind of seek asylum immediately when they leave their country and other countries they may kind of pass through on their way to the U.S.

So kind of beefing up those rules to say, hey, if you pass through two or three other countries, you should have stopped there and sought asylum. And again, we'll let you know if your application is approved and tell you to come on to the U.S. So those are some of the things that are being considered. Those things would be pretty controversial, particularly among progressive Democrats.

And maybe raising the threshold in general for asylum applications, right? Absolutely. That too. Who's eligible, different countries and things like that. What types of situations would be eligible for seeking asylum? Different ways to kind of limit the influx of people at the southern border is kind of the general theme of it.

Okay, so this brings us to our good or bad use of polling example for the day. And here it is. A new democratically aligned polling outfit called Blueprint recently released a set of polls looking at the issues at play in these negotiations. And we've talked about the challenge of issue polls.

before on the podcast, they ask Americans about their views on immigration and national security in a slightly different way than we might be used to, which is in relation to Biden and Trump. So for example, they ask respondents, where would you place Biden on the issue of immigration? Far more liberal than me, somewhat more liberal than me, close to my views, somewhat more conservative, or far more conservative?

They found that voters placed themselves much closer to Trump on the issue of immigration than Biden. So only 25% of Americans said Biden was close to their views on immigration. 56% said he's more liberal. 18% said he's more conservative. On the flip side, 44% of Americans said Trump was close to their views on immigration. 9% said he's more liberal and 46% said he's more conservative.

So for understanding how voters view the issue of immigration and immigration policy, Elliot, is this a good or bad use of polling? I think this question is of very little utility for policymakers. I think it misses a lot of context about immigration that you would need if you are a reporter.

And if you're just an average consumer of the polls, then learning about the average American's relative position to Biden or Trump on one issue also tells you relatively little, I think, about how people are processing the immigration issue writ large.

I don't think this specific question is particularly helpful. No, I do think the wider poll, and maybe we'll get into that, ask some better questions that are useful.

This one, not so much. Wait, so I'm curious, which aspects of the poll do you think are useful? Yeah, I mean, they also ask questions like when it comes to rising number of border crossings in the United States, which approach comes closest to your preference? And the three options are increased legal pathways to immigrate to the United States.

increase border enforcement and make asylum and refugee policy stricter. So those two options being the sort of left and right leaning answers perhaps. And then they ask maybe a more middle of the road option, which is secure the border and limit illegal entry, but also increase pathways to legally enter the United States, which has 45% support on the poll. The left leaning options about 20% and the right leaning options like 36%. So yeah,

I mean, this poll would suggest that people want a moderate solution on immigration, which is not necessarily what you might read into how people feel about a solution based on the sort of proximity-based question. Yeah, I thought, for me, I thought this poll, even the one where people were asked to place themselves in relation to Trump and Biden, was useful for getting a sense of

maybe the electoral politics of this. If you're trying to craft a policy based on that, I don't know that it's super helpful. But I think that, I mean, I feel like I encounter folks who misunderstand how poorly Democrats are viewed on the issue of immigration. And this poll might help paint a sort of picture of that. But Leah, where do you come down on this? Yeah, I actually think it's a good use of polling. I liked it. I think it's

Gets us away from binary conversations about immigration. And, you know, I've said on this podcast before how much conversations based on a binary drive me insane. Seeing how...

respondents believe that Biden's views on immigration were close to their views or of national security and foreign policy were close to their views. I thought this was a really interesting way to explain why that is. And also, as

As you know, we hear Democrats and Biden criticize Trump for his immigration policies being cruel or inhumane. I mean, 44% say that Donald Trump, you know, that Donald Trump's views on immigration are close to theirs. And I

I thought it was a really helpful way to kind of view the spectrum of the electorate and where voters place Biden. And part of the reason I like it is that when it comes to actual immigration policy, there's almost always something more you can do, right? Like it's always like a –

a policy solution that sounds tougher or harsher or, you know, in some cases crueler. And I think that will continue to be the case no matter kind of what policies are put in place. Like this is going, this is an ongoing, ever going conversation in the United States. And so hearing kind of how voters think about it in terms of approach, instead of in terms of like

actual policy. I think that's just how people tend to think about it in general. So yeah, I thought it was a good use of polling. I mean, the polling here, I think it's important to keep in mind the context of the news in which people are

receiving these questions, processing their opinions and then giving them back to the pollster. Right now, the news is all about the number of migrants, right? And about the inability basically of the federal government to control the number of people flowing across ports of entry, but also I guess the number of people coming through undocumented pathways.

as well. And that might color their survey responses too. So if you're thinking about, like, if you want to take a long-term approach, you want to think about policy implications from a who are you closer to question, we have to remember that some parts of the Trump immigration policy were very unpopular, even more unpopular than the general conditions of the border.

The biggest one being, of course, the child separation policy during, I think, 2018. I think two thirds of Americans were opposed to this policy, perhaps for obvious reasons. It was actually, I believe, in some accounting I did back at The Economist, actually the most unpopular presidential policy in recent history.

And so you can imagine asking this question or in that context, you would receive a different portrait of the American public opinion. Hold on, Elliot, you're saying that public opinion like discount public opinion polling because it's responsive to the news of the day. But isn't that the whole point of it? Like, why would we want to be focused on how Americans responded to something five years ago when it's the current circumstances that will dictate the

policy outcomes and elections and things like that. Like, isn't this the point of public opinion? Yeah, I appreciate the pushback. I'm not saying discounted. I'm saying there's like another level to consider here in what being closer to one of the options means for policy solutions in the future. You can imagine that people are processing this question and on average saying they're closer to Trump today when the news that they're being

reminded of is like a general bad conditions narrative for the country, if you buy the narrative. And if Trump is actually in power, they're going to be primed with different information when they're answering these polls. So thermostatic public opinion, in a sense. Yeah, in a sense. Tia, wait, I want to let you get in here really quick. I was going to say my initial reaction was to agree with Elliot for some of the

reasons he raised about the fact that, to me, I felt not so much that it was not the best use of polling, but not the most telling of polling, because we know that, you know, foreign policy is not something that people are well versed on already. Immigration policy, things like that, they're not the best versed on. They're definitely not the best versed on where President Biden actually stands. They might not be the best versed on the things that former President Trump

or has said more recently. And then to have to compare that to relative liberalness or conservatism, I think people also don't always have the best gauge on their own political positions and where they are on the spectrum. So for me, I felt that that's why to me, it wasn't the best use of polling because the pollster, when they kind of summed up the results, they

They provided an option that was a third option, secure the border and limit illegal entry, but also increase pathways for legal immigration. And it received a plurality of support. And it is more in line with where Biden is right now. So they were saying, you know, it's more of a messaging thing with Biden. So again, to me, that shows that

The poll, if anything, tells us about messaging, but it doesn't tell us truly where Biden and Trump line up in relation to, I guess, average voters. Yeah. In the run up to the election, the argument about or the debate about immigration is, I think, is going to be a pretty clear argument.

kind of assault from Republicans on Biden on being too weak on immigration. You know, we saw that. We don't have to expect to see that. We're seeing that now. You know, like that is the Republican position at the moment. And so...

As Democrats prepare for 2024 and potentially prepare to go on offense against Trump on immigration, given that his own policies were so unpopular, like what Elliot said, like we saw the backlash to Trump's border policy and immigration policy during his administration. And despite that, and I think that was a big enough event that voters might not remember exactly what happened, but they remember that.

And despite that backlash, 44% of respondents are saying that Trump's position on immigration is close to their views. Despite what happened four years ago and despite Biden receiving criticism from the left for prolonging some of Trump's policies, only 18% of respondents

respondents thought that Biden was more conservative. I think there's

been an acceptance of Trump's views of immigration and some of his hardline rhetoric. And that I think this kind of is a reality check that going on the offense against some of Trump's rhetoric isn't going to move a significant portion of voters. Yeah. And then just to the point about this being a broadly difficult issue for Democrats, when you ask Americans which party they trust to handle immigration,

immigration, a plurality to the Republicans. It's one of the worst issues for Democrats in all of the issue landscape today. Yeah, I mean, I think that we should also consider in how voters are reacting to all of this that Democrats have increasingly come out and said there's a problem at the southern border that needs to be resolved. You know, big city Democratic mayors, you know, Gavin Newsom himself has said that asylum laws should be reconsidered.

And I totally accept to hear your point about it being difficult for voters to get a complete sense of the policy landscape or fully maybe even understand where they themselves sit on the left right spectrum. But I will say that immigration is one of the issues where voters have a very easy time differentiating between the two parties.

When you ask voters, say, on the economy, what do Democrats want and what do Republicans want? It's a little harder to say, like, well, Democrats want what? Full employment and a good stock market and Republicans want full employment and a good stock. Like, they kind of want the same things, but voters can differentiate very easily between the two parties on immigration, in part because of, you know, Trump's very hawkish position that he's

verbalized for at this point, eight years. Also some of the policy leading up to that before Trump was ever on the scene. And also the fact that Democrats don't talk an awful lot about what exactly they want. Some of the most high profile ways in which they have talked about what they want have been things like abolish ICE, decriminalize crossing the border. And while that may be a vanishingly small part of the party that actually wants those things, they talk about it in a relatively high profile way. And it's people who are sort of darn

wings of the media or who can garner a lot of media attention who do talk about. And so I would say, again, when you look at Gallup polling, immigration actually is pretty high up there on most important issues to people. It actually comes in around 15%. Nothing else apart from the economy and bad government leadership comes really close. And so the combination of people thinking it's a problem and being able to differentiate really easily between the two parties

I think is sort of what this poll shows and is a real thing. Even if people can't say we should change this statute from X to Y because it will do A versus B when it comes to asylum seekers. What this framing gets across to me is how little Biden has to gain by in terms of political popularity,

easing up on immigration policy or taking a softer tone. I mean, 56% of respondents believe that

Joe Biden is more liberal than I believe that they the respondents believe they are more conservative than Biden when it comes to immigration. 56 percent. And that's then 25 percent who think that they're close, close on immigration. Just viewing it kind of as that spectrum instead of a yes or no, approve or disapprove, I think is just really helpful because we're

when we see people disapprove, it's because of two reasons. He's too liberal or too conservative. And now we can see like which ones are, which disapprovers think he's too liberal

liberal and which ones think he's too conservative. And this is going to be a big issue. I mean, if Republicans are down in the polls the weeks leading up to Election Day, you bet there's going to be a massive messaging push about the southern border. That's what happens in elections. It's kind of like Republicans-

go to move toward the end of the cycle if they're falling short. And so having a sense of what is a popular message and where Biden fits in on that scale, I think is really important in terms of just general public opinion. Okay, let's move on and talk about the other big thing that happened in Congress or is happening in Congress, which is this impeachment inquiry. Tia, we saw that

Along strict party lines, the House voted to authorize this inquiry formally this past week. What is the rationale that you were hearing from folks from why they're doing this? The claim is that Biden benefited from his son's and brother's business dealings as vice president. But so far, any investigations that they've done in the House haven't bared any evidence to prove anything whatsoever. So what's the idea here? And what are people saying about actual impeachments?

So Republicans have been really smart in how they're framing this to give cover to authorizing an impeachment inquiry without having to tackle the fact that they have no evidence to warrant impeaching the president. And so what they're saying is they're just authorizing fact finding.

Most now, of course, there are, you know, the further to the right you get, the more you have members willing to say they believe that Joe Biden should be impeached and they believe of wrongdoing. But the members of the party that are a lot more hesitant on impeachment still went forward with the inquiry.

because they said it's just about asking questions, looking into things, making sure there's no wrongdoing. They use the word accountability in all of their statements. And so that's how they're framing it. Not as we know the president did something wrong, as in we're just making sure the president didn't do anything wrong. And that's why

All House Republicans voted to authorize the inquiry. Now, the question is, we know the far right's not going to stop there. So what happens when they do in the future have to vote on impeachment? Are they going to now feel pressured to keep moving forward, knowing that they've got a lot of Trump supporters?

Republicans in their base that won't want to see any Republicans voting no. So they put themselves in a tough spot in the future. But for right now, they feel protected with the path that they've chosen.

I'll just say here that we looked at the average of polls in support or opposition to this impeachment inquiry. And interestingly enough, I mean, it was basically tied, but there was slightly more support for the impeachment inquiry than against it. 43% in favor, 41% opposed polls since October, of course, with 15% undecided there.

That is significantly more support than there was for the impeachment inquiry into Trump in 2019. And also, maybe more notably, back then, only 9% of Republicans supported that Democratic-led impeachment inquiry. And 18% of Democrats support the impeachment inquiry right now into President Biden.

What's going on here? When I saw the polling that more Democrats are willing to support the impeachment inquiry of Biden than Republicans were willing to support the impeachment inquiry of Trump,

is because, again, the messaging about the inquiry is different this time. Back when Democrats were launching an impeachment inquiry of Trump, they were convinced he had done something wrong already about the whole Russia-Ukraine collusion stuff. So they were already on a path towards impeachment. This was just a step along that path, but they already felt like there was evidence there of wrongdoing, and that was how they sold the inquiry.

Whereas, again, the messaging from Republicans on selling the inquiry is, quite frankly, saying, well, we're not necessarily saying he did something wrong. Some Republicans, again, are saying they already feel like it. But there are a lot of members of Congress who are saying all we're saying is accountability. Let's look into it. If he did nothing wrong, he has nothing to worry about.

And I think that type of messaging is more likely to get bipartisan support, not necessarily among in the halls of Congress. But again, with if someone's just hearing that a Democrat voter saying, OK, well, if they're saying this is just about accountability and fact finding, OK, I don't see the harm in it. So to me, it makes sense that up to, you know, almost one in five Democrats could take that position.

Elliot, what are your thoughts on all of this? I think impeachment public opinion is very fickle. It turns, I think Tia's making some great points about it turns on the framing of the inquiry itself. This time it's a little more accessible and

to the president's co-partisans, his party among the mass public. It also turns very quickly based on the actual evidence that's uncovered, at least in cases of severe wrongdoing, which, you know, we seem unlikely to find, at least based on the evidence presented to us so far from the last two years of an unofficial inquiry.

So, right, Elliot. And also, I should add to that point exactly that as soon as Democrats did open the inquiry, and you heard strong support from leaders of the party, like Pelosi and Schumer in support of pursuing that inquiry, public opinion flipped, and there was a majority in favor of the inquiry relatively quickly. So yes, these things can be fluid. Yeah, I think support increased by like 15 percentage points or something, even more if you look at the net margin between support.

and not supporting. And support for actual impeachment changed too, although it was pretty close the whole time on whether or not he should be impeached or acquitted. So I would expect this to change.

And therefore, it's somewhat hard for me to make any judgments about the public because they're just reacting. Basically, right now, they're just reacting to the messaging. If you believe that the investigators have done a pretty decent job of uncovering whatever there is to uncover so far, then you might expect stasis after whatever residual sorting we're going to get, which I expect to move probably in the don't support direction. But we'll see. But.

But sort of back to in the sense of what Tia was saying and something that Leah has brought up on the podcast before is if they go down this path where they open the inquiry and then they don't end up impeaching Biden, isn't that like a gift in the sense that you're saying we really looked, we did the inquiry, we did our accountability, and we're not impeaching the president, which is to say he has a clean bill of health. And...

Then voters can go into the 2024 election thinking, OK, he didn't there wasn't any wrongdoing. Whereas if they pursue impeachment and it feels like because they feel like they have to because they did this inquiry and they don't want to give him a clean bill of health and everyone's partisan and so they have to go down this path, then they also risk turning the president into a

a victim and inciting a backlash against themselves. So I understand why the framing might work now, but have they created a trap for themselves in the future? Yeah, I think if in two months, Mike Johnson says,

We couldn't find any evidence of wrongdoing by Biden. We're going to close down the inquiry. You still get 35 to 40% of the country saying he should be impeached for the same crime, alleged crime, right? There's just a real lack of...

rationality when it comes to impeaching a president you don't like. People see it as a tool to get rid of someone that they don't support rather than as a tool for actually prosecuting wrongdoing, which in some ways, Galen, it's very nice that you have this rational view of the public. And in many ways, they are rational. But I think when it comes to impeachment nowadays in our

era of hyper polarization, not, you know, I think it's much less rational. Well, I guess they can just keep the inquiry open through Election Day. But yeah, Leah, what do you think about this? The political pressures that House Republicans responding to aren't necessarily the political pressures of the Republican base themselves. It's Trump. This is a Trump phenomenon. Trump is asking for this. And if Republicans do not

Follow along with his request, then public opinion will in fact turn against a lot of these Republicans who have not taken his side. So even though I think overwhelmingly, like looking at 42% of the public who that's not enough to actually vote.

create a massive amount of pressure on a party. And that's what was, I think, that's what's hard to square is that you have two different political kind of pressure points. One is from public opinion and one is from the public opinion that will happen if Trump responds in a certain way to the actions of the House and the Senate. All right. Well, it sounds like Congress is taking it from all sides. Yeah.

No, sorry. I'm sorry. No, no pun intended. Or maybe it was. Either way, we're going to move on and talk about the fact that primary voting is going to begin very soon in less than a month. I guess caucusing will begin in less than a month in Iowa. And Tia, we're going to let you go for that. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks a bunch, guys.

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We are now less than one month away from the Iowa caucuses. And according to our average of polls, former President Trump currently leads the pack in Iowa by 30 percentage points. And his advantage in national polls of Republican voters is even more dominant.

There he's ahead of Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley by about 50 percentage points. So Elliot, we're going to begin with you. A couple months ago, you ran the data through a model and found that Trump had about an 80% chance of winning the nomination. And of course, this isn't a forecast that we publish on the site, but it's something that you have in the background to sort of maybe check our gut instincts, synthesize a bunch of different information that we have about the primary. So that was then.

Given the data that I just mentioned now and the other data that's out there, what does the same model say with a month to Iowa? Yeah, I am going to submit my like weaselly caveat before I give you a probability. And that is we are in historically unprecedented times with this Republican primary. One candidate...

The leader is particularly old and also in legal jeopardy. These primaries can be very unpredictable based on who gets to compete in which states. Not all the candidates are competing in each state. And so there are some...

factors that you can't account for with history-based models, which is the type that we use to contextualize polling information. Basically, I'm not talking about non-polling probabilities here. So actual probabilities could be lower. Okay. With that being said, if you buy the polls and you don't put a lot of weight on the non-polling factors, this primary is

the almost over range. Specifically, that probability for Trump has climbed from about 4 and 5 or 80% to above 9 and 10. It's closer to 95% today, actually, based on some of his gains in the polls over the weekend. And what we're saying when we say 90% chance of winning, what we mean is that a candidate who is ahead in opportunity

Iowa by 30 points and 50 points nationally, about nine in 10 times historically that person has gone on to win. So those probabilities are our way of contextualizing two pieces of information. One, the lead that a candidate has and two, the time remaining in the contest.

Yeah, Elliot, I don't think that's Weasley. I appreciate those caveats, because I do, especially when we're talking about primaries, especially when we're talking about presidential elections and primaries in particular, we have such a limited sample to go off of, you know, these primaries, the way that we do them now only began in the 70s. We've only had a dozen presidential elections since then. So we're not talking about like baseball, where we have

tens of thousands of data points to work off of. And we're also, as you mentioned, talking about a historically unprecedented situation. And so we should remain humble, I would say, in applications of data when the sample set is so small.

And also, given all of that, according to the numbers that you crunched and your historical perspective of this, a candidate who has been polling like Donald Trump is polling has never gone on to lose the primary. Correct? Yeah. So the...

The closest example is George Bush in 2000. That was a technically open primary. And in December, in middle December, he had 60% in the national polls. Trump, well, when we ran this, he was at 64. The 2000 Republican primary was not a particularly close contest. In fact, every presidential primary candidate above 40% in the national polls in December has gone on to win.

And if you can extend that a little further, every candidate above 30% has won except for Hillary Clinton in 2008, who, as we will note in a second, faced a particularly hard challenge from a surprise Barack Obama victory after Iowa. So...

The types of candidates we would associate with Trump's positions in the polls are winners by and large. One of, I thought, the most interesting data points that you pulled up from looking at the past 50 or so years is how much the polls change between now and caucus day on average. And it was only four percentage points difference.

I mean, that was surprising to me because, of course, that's the average and people have experienced much more significant momentum boosts or whatever you may call it. But you think of these primaries as being pretty volatile. And so only a four percentage point on average change between now and caucus day doesn't feel like it represents that volatility. Yeah, that's right. I mean, just to make this point even a little more.

The only time that there's volatility is when there's some punctuation in the race that causes some candidates to gain or lose ground. So in 2012, Herman Cain drops out and like 15% of the vote has to go somewhere. And so it goes to, by and large, Rick Santorum. Newt Gingrich is also sort of

on the way down in the polls in middle of December nationally. And that seems to tank his polls in Iowa as well. He goes down to his, his polls sink by like 12%. And so it might seem a little counterintuitive for us to say, well,

primaries are really volatile there's lots of path dependency we say which like if candidate does really well in one contest and they get some amount of momentum although this is debated in the literature um but before Iowa and the lead up to Iowa there's not a whole lot of um cause for voters to change their minds yet and further uh again to

really hit, you know, sort of beat the dead horse here. Usually that happens when there's like five candidates all around 15 to 20%, not when you have one candidate at 40 to 50% in the polls. That's a pretty clear verdict from the voters.

Leah, I know that you have been looking at how much endorsements matter. I think we ask this question at least every four years, if not more often. Do endorsements really matter? To set the context here, of course, New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu endorsed Nikki Haley last week. Of course, DeSantis has already been endorsed by Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds and high-profile evangelical leader in Iowa Bob Vander Plaats, who has a good track record of endorsing the Republican winner in Iowa.

I should also mention, to be completist here, we have an actual endorsement tracker at 538. And there's about 2000 points that a candidate can win or earn from that endorsement tracker in total. And Trump has, as of this taping, 507 points, DeSantis has 51 points, and Haley has only 13%.

points. So we are talking about some of the recent endorsements here. But when you look at the endorsement landscape on the whole, it skews much more towards Trump. How much does all of this matter, if at all? So it could matter. That's the big takeaway. It could have mattered, maybe is the better way to phrase it at this point in the race. Part of the reason endorsements matter, it's less about

actually, you know, following opinion leaders and their points of view. It's about getting like party activists all on the same page pretty early on. So it's about building a consensus, about sharing resources, about having a wide network of campaign surrogates who can go around and talk on behalf of the campaign. In theory, and like the big kind of in the

lifetime of a campaign, an endorsement can make a really big difference. But we are about a month away from Iowa now, and most Republican Party leaders have not made endorsements, and those who have, have overwhelmingly endorsed Trump.

So like what would need to happen three weeks before Iowa, two weeks before Iowa that would actually change the trajectory of the primary in terms of like a massive endorsement? I don't think we're going to see what we saw in 2020 with Joe Biden with every presidential candidate kind of

coalescing around him right after South Carolina and that changing the dynamic of the race, there isn't a Joe Biden-esque candidate running in the Republican primary.

And most importantly, Trump's lead, even if every other candidate did drop out, even if every other candidate who dropped out, all of their supporters went to somebody who's not Trump, it still is barely enough or hardly enough to actually prevent Trump from winning the nomination at this point. So anyway, it could have mattered if Republicans had gotten together early on in the cycle and decided that they wanted an alternative candidate who had proven him or herself, then it

Sure. But this point, hard to imagine. But then again, like what Elliot said, I mean, what was it, 9 in 10 chance that, you know, Trump ends up with the nomination? You know, that's still a 1 in 10 chance something can happen. I think about like the Shishito Peppers, theoretically. Yeah.

one in 10 shishito peppers is spicy. We've all had a spicy shishito pepper. So like, you know, we have to make room for the shishito pepper, but really it's hard to imagine something happening. Bringing the accessibility in data analysis. I love that, Leah. That's great, Leah.

That's awesome. I don't know if it's true. I don't know if it's actually true about the shishito peppers. The shishito pepper theory of presidential primaries. This is good. Well, it's just you got to be like, yeah, if somebody gave you like,

10 crispics. I'm eating Chex Mix. And they're like, one of them is going to kill you. You wouldn't be like, oh, I don't care. There's only one in 10 chance. I'm like, just eat one of them. You'd be like, no, that's not great. So I'm not saying... Anyway, that's how I feel about probability. But that's another day. We don't have to go into that. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like there ultimately isn't a ton to say here, either on polling volatility or endorsements, just because

the data that we do have is so overwhelming. I mean, I will say that over the weekend, we got some new polling out of New Hampshire that showed Nikki Haley, who was already performing well, though, jumping up, you know, like 10 percentage points after Chris Sununu's

endorsement. Maybe that's just more evidence that they really, the endorsements do matter. They can matter, but you need to like pile them up in a way that gets you, well, either a plurality or a majority, which is a point that we're still not at. Yeah.

Forgive me, but they matter when the party decides. I know that's going to be controversial after Trump. You can debate it either way. Maybe the party decided not to decide, whatever. But at least in 2023, almost 2024, I think the perspective should be the party has decided that he's a risk that they're willing to take at the worst case and decided enthusiastically in his favor in the most optimistic case for him. He's ahead by...

450 endorsement points. Ron DeSantis has 51. He has 510. The national polls also show that the voters have received this endorsement from the party elites, or maybe it's going the other way around, or maybe they're pretty independent. And Republicans, here's a very simple theory, just like Donald Trump and want him to be their president. And there's a one in 10 chance that, yeah, there's like a

sort of chaos theory butterfly effect if Haley can win or come within five points in New Hampshire and then like boost her way after Super Tuesday. There's like, there's one, one in 10 chance of all that stuff happened and it's happened before. But yeah, in the case where you're trying to find a pretty simple theory to explain this all, maybe they just like the guy. All the evidence seems to suggest this.

So you have to find something that makes them not overwhelmingly like their former president and party leader. And that's pretty tough to do. And a lot of them. You have to get a lot of them to stop liking him. It's not like...

you know, an endorsement in a race that's like 48-48, like, yeah, that can make a difference. I mean, so can whether it rains on election day, you know, like a lot of things can make a difference. But when we're talking about a spread of, you know, 20, 30 points, like that's – it could help, but that's not how it works.

I think we can sum this up to say endorsements matter around the margins and can matter most when either the race is close or a lot of voters haven't made up their mind. But neither of those situations is the case right now. Yeah. All right. With that, let's move on and talk about who showed up to the polls in 2023.

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Since former President Trump took office in 2017, we've been in an especially high voter turnout environment. 2018 and 2020 broke decades-long turnout records. In 2020, two-thirds of eligible Americans cast a ballot. Even 2022, while down from 2018, was still elevated compared to other recent years.

And in an environment where fewer voters are changing between parties from one election to the next, shifts in turnout can matter a lot. To that end, a group of our colleagues at FiveThirtyEight, Tia Yang, Holly Fong, and Mary Radcliffe embarked on the big project of tracking turnout trends over the past year and seeing if they continued the trend or not.

from years past. Also what this might all pretend for 2023. So Tia Yang joins us now. She's a reporter and editor at FiveThirtyEight. Welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me, Galen. Tia, it is a really big day for Tias on this podcast because we also had another Tia on earlier. So I just want you to know that the legacy of Tias runs deep on today's podcast. You're in the company of greats. And we also have Aaliyah. I mean, a Tia Tia and Aaliyah is really a special podcast. Elliot, I'm sorry. I was going to say, Elliot, what are you doing here? This is discrimination.

I don't really know how Galen fits into it either, but you know, whatever. Okay. So Tia jokes aside, you conducted this unique data analysis. What states did you look at? Like, how did you collect and analyze this data to come to conclusions?

Unlike in even years when every voter in every state has a major race at the top of their ballot off your elections, like 2023 generally only have major races in a handful of states. So we looked at five of those states. We looked at Ohio, which had a ballot question on codifying the right to abortion in the state constitution. We looked at Virginia and New Jersey, which

Both have state legislature races, every seat's on the ballot every off year. We looked at Pennsylvania, where off-year elections typically include a state Supreme Court race or, if not, a superior court race. And then Kentucky, where there was a competitive governor's race. And it's worth noting that Mississippi also had a competitive governor's race, but we did...

kind of grab all this data by hand and their filing of county level reports was a little bit tougher to dig through. So we focused on those five states. And for all of those states, we specifically calculated turnout levels based on census data for the eligible voting population. And because of the difficulties in comparing at a national level, because like different races in every state,

We specifically compared these to the turnout rates that we saw in those states in the last comparable election. So whether that was two years ago or four years ago, the last time that state held like the same type of election. All right. So I have been leading on listeners long enough by priming your conclusions from all of this data analysis. What did you find?

So we found a few different things. We looked at both the demographic trends at a county by county level. We looked at what the turnout levels were by county to see which counties were turning out at higher rates than other counties. And also maybe what those turnout rates looked like compared to previous years in the same counties.

So I would say one of the main things that we found was that suburban areas and ex-urban areas were turning out at much higher rates than cities, including sometimes like if you look at a map, adjacent cities would have much lower turnout rates than the surrounding suburbs.

So that's definitely a major trend that we saw coming out of it at a county by county level. And then the other item would be just that we are in sort of a high turnout era. That's been a big point of discussion since Donald Trump took office. And we definitely saw that these turnout rates, though they're lower because, like we mentioned, this is an off year election. They definitely were comparable to other off year elections since Trump took office.

And sort of exhibited the same trends that we've been seeing in elections since that time. So the best question is also the hardest to answer with data like this, which is why? Why is it still just Trump? Is it abortion? Is it Biden? Like, what do you chalk up these trends to?

Yeah, so complicated answers, you said. There are definitely a number of contributing factors. One thing behind just the high turnout rates would just be that a lot of it comes down to political engagement going up. We see that people are being

More engaged at more consistent rates, which I'll go into a little bit later, especially during COVID, it became a lot easier for people to vote. A lot of states enacted or expanded mail-in or early voting laws. So there's definitely a little bit more consistency in what we're seeing across who's participating in different types of elections.

And then the other factor that you mentioned would be sort of like messaging. So abortion, for example, Ohio was a big example of that this year, where we saw pretty high turnout in some counties that voted highly in favor of that abortion measure issue one.

And one example I would give of that actually is that we saw particularly high turnout in some excerpts outside of the major city centers in Ohio. And that included in some counties that are historically Republican and voted pretty convincingly for Trump in 2020, for Senator J.D. Vance in 2022, but voted in favor of this abortion issue this year.

Yeah. And I should say, it doesn't seem like this issue is going away. The Supreme Court announced last week that it's going to hear a challenge to the FDA regulation of Mifepristone. So that could be coming sometime around June of 2024. You know, what do you chalk up the difference between cities, suburbs and exurbs to? One thing that we found, race seems to be a pretty big part of Democrats' issues in cities.

For example, Kentucky, which is demographically not as racially diverse as some of the other states we looked at. It was one of the states that had the sort of lowest amount of difference between the cities and suburbs. It just wasn't quite as stark of a jump between turnout rates in those types of areas.

But Pennsylvania is a really great example of how the opposite is sort of true. This year, some of the state's highest turnout rates there came in the Philadelphia collar counties, Bucks, Chester, Montgomery, Delaware. But Philadelphia, which according to the census data we use, actually has almost half of the state's black population and almost a quarter of its Latino population. It once again had one of the lowest turnout rates in the whole in the whole state.

just over 25%, I believe. All right, listening to all of this, Elliot and Leah, what do you make of it when thinking about next year or just broader trends in our politics? The thing that I was reminded of in reading the piece and hearing Tia talk is that

the coalition for the democratic party is somewhat dramatically different in off year elections now than in presidential cycles. Um, because, um,

Education, particularly education for whites, has become so much higher correlated with vote choice. It was always correlated with turnout, but now it's correlated with vote choice too. So I suspect that if you ran regressions on these county level data to see how education was predicting turnout and residual democratic performance in places like

Northern Virginia, for Virginia, but also the suburbs around Lexington and Kentucky and so forth, you would see that that's a stronger predictor. And what that means in my head is that we should expect some reversion in democratic performance in 2024 when lower turnout voters, voters both like the black voters who we see aren't turning out in cities, also young voters who aren't turning out in cities,

but also lots of rural white voters that are more Republican-leaning. Presumably they turn out in high turnout presidential general elections, which is what I would suspect based on the trends in these down ballot races that Tia and her colleagues spent so much time gathering. So yeah, if you're looking for a signal here for...

you know, like how the election is going to look next year. It's not clear to me that it's entirely an optimistic signal for, for Democrats. I think I could kind of argue it either way. Yeah. I'm curious how much, and this might be a question for,

any of you. But like how much the individual candidates on the ballot have to do with it, I'm just thinking about like just the lack of enthusiasm for – I mean in some ways Trump has like driven up turnout because he's brought in – there are people who are watching politics much more actively than they did before Trump came down that escalator.

And, you know, with young voters and black voters, obviously, like turnout was higher with Obama on the ballot. So how how much does the fact that Biden and Trump, I mean, both their support seems pretty tepid right now. Like, does that have an impact on on turnout? That's that's my question. Maybe it's my question for you. Maybe it's my existential question about 2024. But it is a question.

Yeah, are there lots of candidate specific or like state specific differences here, Tia, that we might attribute to a Bashir effect or polarizing Yunkin effect or something? I would say Ohio is definitely an example of how issues might have been the biggest driver in this election. Ohio did have the highest rate out of the

States that we looked at at 43%, which is pretty, pretty high, considering that it's an off your election. I mean, for comparison, the midterms last year, I think the national turnout rate was around 52. And actually, Ohio's rate, I believe, was around 47. So that's really not a huge difference between 2022 when we saw

a competitive Senate race. That was when J.D. Vance won election in 2022. And this year, when the highest thing on the ballot was that abortion initiative and also another ballot initiative related to legalizing recreational use of marijuana. So I would say Ohio is really high turnout, which was pretty consistent across the state, is a good signal that voters are being motivated by issues.

Again, it's not a one for one, like it wasn't like all Republicans support this issue, all Democrats support that issue. But I would say that is definitely a signal. And if Democrats were kind of putting a lot of their eggs in the abortion basket, as far as how they were spending their advertising, how they were doing their messaging, they're probably encouraged by this. And abortion did also come up in Congress.

Almost all of the other races this year, even in Pennsylvania, for example, where it's not like in Virginia, the threat of a Republican trifecta was a big focus of Democrats messaging where, you know, if if Republicans had flipped both chambers of the state legislature, Youngkin has proposed 15 week abortion bans.

But in contrast, Pennsylvania currently has Democratic control of the governor's mansion, one chamber of the state legislature, and already had a 4-2 majority on the Supreme Court. And yet abortion was still a big focus of Democrats' efforts to turn out the vote on that last Supreme Court seat, which was an open seat.

Yeah, if I'm Joe Biden's presidential campaign right now, I would probably have a whole division of staffers devoted to getting abortion on the ballot and at the state level, based on what we've seen for residual turnout and Democratic overperformance in these places. Yeah, it looks like it is either likely or possible to make the ballot in places like Arizona, maybe the most high profile of the states, Nevada as well, potentially. I know those efforts in Florida are

And I should say, we were talking about differentiation between the parties in the context of immigration. This is also an issue where it's really easy for voters to differentiate between the two parties. In fact, there's like more than five decades of history and baggage that have helped differentiate between the two parties. And so it's like immigration, an issue where if it's salient, if voters are thinking about it, can either drive up turnout or maybe even change how people end up voting.

You know, lastly, Tia, as we wrap up here, to what do you chalk up the low turnout in cities? All politics is local, but yeah, it really depended on the race. I think, for example, in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia voters didn't really have Philadelphia Democratic voters specifically didn't have too much to turn out for. There was a mayoral race here, but obviously it was a pretty safe race.

win. Um, the only people who might've been really motivated to turn out would have been, uh, maybe progressives looking to influence the city council races where two progressives did win some seats over Republicans. Um,

But on the whole, there wasn't something really motivating turnout compared to Allegheny County in Pittsburgh, which had a couple of really competitive races there and did see a lot higher turnout than Philly. So I would say like as far as reading into 2023, it's hard to say it really depended on what was on the ballot. But I do think that it's definitely a trend that voters in urban areas are just turning out at lower rates. And one thing that I would note is we did

sort of run some analysis. We would like to do more. We have a lot of data, but we did look at

correlations between education, race, and a few other sort of demographic factors. And we really found that the urbanicity was the biggest story that all of these things told. So one thing that we looked at that was sort of surprising to us was we did look at the trends and the distribution of voter turnout in counties by race. And for example, we grabbed just the counties. I think it was Virginia that we did this in. We grabbed just the counties that

that had large non-white populations, so 40% or more non-white. And we found that the distribution of turnout in those counties was actually quite similar to the state overall. So even as we saw big differences in, for example, Danville City, a locality that was over 40% black,

had, I think it was 14% turnout compared to 30 some percent in the surrounding county. We also found that a lot of rural counties that had large black populations were turning out at higher rates than urban counties. So it really, the biggest correlation we found was in that urbanicity factor, not in other factors.

Interesting. Not to say that it's not a factor at all, but that was an interesting finding. Even considering education or race or what have you, the fact of living in a city in and of itself depresses turnout. Like not necessarily, I don't know what it is about the cities, but like it is that specific factor. It's that urban smog. It's that urban smog. Yeah.

Interesting. Interesting. Well, we'll see if that holds for next year, but we're going to leave things there for today. Thank you, Tia, Elliot, and Leah. Thanks so much for having me. My pleasure. Thanks. And I should say that that piece that Tia did along with our other colleagues is forthcoming on the website. You've got a little sneak preview of it today, but you'll be able to read and see all of the data in the coming weeks.

That's it for today. My name is Dillon Drew. Tony Chow is in the control room. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Chertavian. And our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts.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 wherever you listen to your podcasts. Or better yet, tell us about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.