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How old are you, 42? No, so I actually want to start telling people that I'm like 45 so that everyone is like, oh my God, you look amazing. What is your secret, Galen? Right, isn't that way better than like, oh, just another, you know, do I want to say exactly how old I am? Just another 30X year old.
Hello and welcome to this not-so-late-night election reaction edition of the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. It's just about a quarter past 10 p.m. Eastern, and we're already ready to record a podcast talking about the election.
talking about some of the results from the evening. So we're going to dive into the details, but just at the top, a referendum in Ohio passed that codified abortion rights into the state constitution, as well as a referendum legalizing marijuana. In Kentucky, Democrat Andy Beshear was reelected
That's already been called. We don't know exactly how the numbers are going to net out in Virginia, but so far it looks like Republicans are not going to win a trifecta there. We haven't stayed up late enough to get a result in Mississippi, but things are pretty much
shaping up the way we thought they would based on the polling before election night. So we're going to sit down and talk about it. And here with me is senior elections analyst, Nathaniel Rakich. Hey, Nathaniel, happy election night. I just, I want to put it on the record that I wanted to record this podcast later so that we would have more results so that you, the listener, would be better informed. And I said, who needs to be informed? What are we, journalists? Yeah.
Also here with us is Director of Data Analytics, Elliot Morris. Welcome to the podcast and welcome to the studio. Hey, it's great in here. I'm really happy to be here. I should say for folks listening at home, we are actually all sitting together around a table drinking our post-election beverages. I won't tell you what they are. You can use your imagination. Could be tea, could be whiskey, could be coffee, could be Celsius energy drinks, which is not a sponsor of the podcast. Could be whiskey.
But it also could be whiskey. Could be. I mean, honestly, who's to say? Okay, so I am going to start off speaking broadly. Going into election night, we had three competing data sets, I would say.
On one hand, we've gotten a lot of polling suggesting that Biden is historically unpopular, which would probably not be good news for Democrats, given that he's in the White House. And in off-year elections, you sometimes see a backlash to unpopular incumbents. We also saw from special elections over the past year that Democrats were actually performing quite well, doing better than the partisanship of the districts where they were winning these special elections would suggest.
At the same time, we also saw national polling, you know, a year out polling a hypothetical 2024 election between Biden and Trump that was essentially tied according to averages that you calculated, Elliot. So on one hand, we have advantage Republican. On the other hand, well, we have three hands in this scenario. On the other hand, we have advantage Democrats. And then we have a tie. So you could kind of point to whichever data set you wanted to describe the
the national mood, the national environment. How far does tonight's results take us? Do tonight's results take us towards determining which bucket we should put more faith in? Nathaniel? I mean, they don't. Like the results, as you said off the top, like we're basically as we expected. And I think I mentioned on a podcast that it feels like
It felt like going in that like all these contests were happening on the state level based on state level issues. And I think that that has remained true. Like Andy Beshear has won reelection in Kentucky. I don't think anybody thinks that Kentucky is going to be competitive on the presidential level. Everybody agrees Andy Beshear is just a strong candidate who is a good fit for Kentucky. In Virginia, Democrats did, you
you know, well, it looks like they are, have kept control of the state Senate. The House of Delegates is still up in the air, but they've at least prevented Republicans from taking full control. But that's kind of status quo and they didn't like, you know, blow the doors off the place. So, you know, that may be in a situation where if Democrats have done really well, you would say like, oh, you know, blue wave time. But, um, but that didn't come to pass. Um,
Other examples in Ohio, like, you know, it wasn't even a partisan election technically, right? You know, could have had like Republicans and certainly independents who voted for abortion rights and for marijuana. So I just think that these results, while good for Democrats and liberals in the aggregate,
like policy-wise in terms of results, like none of them was out of place or, you know, or is inconsistent with an environment in which, you know, Trump is maybe, you know, tied or slightly leading with Biden because they, all of these things are kind of divorced from the presidential race and presidential politics. Okay. So I think I hear that, but also,
Despite the fact that this was not a surprise, the polling looked pretty good for Democrats going into tonight. So a result that is in line with what the poll suggested, while not surprising, may still be suggestive of a better environment for Democrats than some of the other data points would suggest. Elliot, where do you fall on this? Yeah, I...
I hear what Nathaniel is saying. Well, it sounds like I'm disagreeing with him. I think he's right that these elections are taking place with a lot of state-specific or candidate-specific factors that make them more democratic than they would be if you repeated them in 2024 or with different candidates. Or they look more democratic than they would otherwise be. So, you know, going into 2024, you probably expect...
Maybe just based on the Virginia House of Delegates implied popular vote. Again, it's too early for us to know for sure what that's going to be. It looks about slightly R-leaning, a little bit more Democratic, maybe depending on how these last races go. I don't know. It's like 365 days before the election. You can tell yourself a story that these polls are maybe two points too Republican, but I don't know. I don't know.
I feel like definitely the special elections are probably too democratic and whatever your expectations are based on Biden's approval numbers, probably too Republican. Yeah. I mean, I just think that like, you know, like we didn't like the generic congressional ballot, which is would be my go to for measuring the national environment for 2024. Just like.
isn't relevant to tonight, like other than like special election results, which we got, we have, there was a special election in Rhode Island's first congressional district that Democrat Gabe Amo, who is now gonna become the first person of color to represent Rhode Island in Congress, so congratulations to him.
But he won by 65 percent to 35 percent, which is basically the same as Biden won in in the Rhode Island district in 2020, which is, you know, a like, you know, Democrats would would take a repeat of 2020, I think. But it's not like an outstanding performance. Democrats have done better in other special elections this year. I haven't had the chance to look at state legislative special elections yet this year. But like, you know, like the generic congressional ballot is not going to tell us anything about Kentucky governor or Mississippi governor. So, yeah.
I just think it's a separate question. For sure. And look, I've been talking to the folks at ABC all night being like, this isn't predictive of 2024. It's important to keep that in mind and look at all the state-specific peculiarities of this race or that race. But like,
At a certain point, though, too, I have to say, think about the Tea Party backlash to Obama. Is there any chance we're seeing, no matter how differentiated, like a Democrat winning reelection in Kentucky or like a
a special election in Rhode Island where there's no difference between Obama's 2008 performance and that special election, right? Like it's, no, I'm saying compare it to the Tea Party era. Oh, I see. Okay. We're not seeing repeats of 2008 level performances because there had been a significant backlash.
And it seems like based on the favorability polling approval numbers that there is a backlash to Biden. But I'm just not seeing it in actual results. Yeah, not among the people showing up to the polls, right? Well, let's expand on that then. Not amongst the people showing up to the polls.
Right. I mean, I tweeted this earlier. This is not the election result you would expect if a president has a 38% approval rating in an off year where they've been president for three years and inflation has been at like 10% at some point over the last three years. Okay. That's what I was trying to get somebody to say. So go ahead. Explain what's going on. So why are the results so much more Democratic in places like Kentucky than they were the last time Andy Beshear ran for three-year election? And why are they as Democratic
in Rhode Island as they were in 2020. My theory is that you have, well, here's maybe two or three things to consider. One, the types of people voting are not the same as the types of people answering polls.
Two, there could be measurement error in the polls when people are asked, are you going to vote for Biden next year or do you approve of Biden? They could be signaling their dissatisfaction with him even if they might vote for him later. And so that would exacerbate or exaggerate the implied backlash to him. I guess, you know, just like, yeah, again, finally, there's a lot of idiosyncrasies here, so we shouldn't put too much weight on any individual contest. Right. I just think that
I mean, Rhode Island is its own case, but I just think that Kentucky governor has no bearing on presidential— Okay, then put aside Kentucky governor and talk about Virginia. That also doesn't have any bearing because that was—Glenn Youngkin is the governor of Virginia who is mildly popular, and it was essentially his midterm election and kind of a referendum on him and his policies. I just don't think that Biden was a big factor here.
Like, I think the most. But that's really notable. A super unpopular incumbent president isn't a factor in an off year election. I agree with that. But it doesn't mean anything for the presidential race. Like, that's not what I'm saying. Right. I'm saying what is going on. I don't understand the national environment based on the numbers that I have in front of me in tonight's result.
I think it could be, I mean, like in 2022, there was no national environment, right? Like, ooh, like, you know, crazy. Like every state had its own national quote unquote environment, right? Well, there's a national environment with state level intercepts. Sure.
Okay, nerd. Get him, get him, Elliot. But no, like, you know, and I kind of think that like we're in, we're still in that situation where like every state is going to behave on its own. And that just, I mean, you've already said that you're not like, you know, fishing for kind of clues to the presidential race, but like,
No, I'm fishing for clues to the political environment right now. But there is no – but I'm saying like we – there was a good period of time for like much of like my political – like the time in which I became a political analyst where like there was a political environment and like –
everything went according to it. If it was a D plus six year, everything was just D plus six. And if it was an R plus four year, everything was R plus four. And in 2022, that didn't happen. And it seems like we're still in that situation where like, you can't be like there's one national environment. There may be a national environment for the presidential race. There may be a different national environment for the, you know, like congressional races in Pennsylvania. But,
I don't know. That is not a national environment. Right, exactly. It's just an environment. They're fractured. It's a state environment. I'm saying they're fractured. So basically, the results that we're seeing...
One thing that I think is lost in the whole like, you know, which is right, the special election results or the polls is that like they're measuring different things, right? Like, you know, I do think that polls a year out from the presidential election have very little to none predictive value. But like maybe we are – maybe we're in a situation where like Trump wins the presidency but Democrats win both houses of Congress because –
like Biden is super unpopular and you know I mean I think that Trump will you know there will be some reversion to the mean and Trump's like convictions and things right now like Biden is the one in the news and Trump is a little bit out of the news but that could change but like I'm saying that like the congressional races may not turn out the same way as the presidential race.
So what we are saying is that things have changed. And in fact, I'll shout out Cameron Tretavian, who's behind the board over there. He turned to me and he's like, I don't know, it doesn't seem kind of refreshing that there are state level differentiators in elections, like that not everything is so nationalized that people can't see sort of what's right in front of them, that local elections are still local elections.
We don't usually do sort of like normative judgments on this podcast, but like maybe even from academic research or whatever, like is it from a civics perspective good that voters are differentiating their state politics from their national politics? I think I'm going to get canceled for this.
I think it's good when parties are polarized. I think it offers voters a heuristic for which they can decide who is going or with which they can decide who is going to be on their side, who's going to fight for them. And if you don't have that partisan sorting of the issue space, then
then it's really hard for you as a voter to figure out who you should vote for. And yes, in the ideal world, all of us are paying attention to politics all the time. We're always reading the New York Times homepage. Wow, that sounds like a pretty dystopian ideal world to me. We know all the people running in our local elections, and we can tell them apart. But that's not the world we live in. So we want to live in a world where people can make informed decisions with the amount of information they have. And I think in that world,
to an extent, polarized parties are helpful. Probably not to the extent that we have right now, but just while we're thinking normatively about what this tells us, that's a consideration. You're a little bit answering a different question. Oh, totally. Definitely a different question. Wait, you just took my question and answered it however you wanted to? Well, you said what's the normative, what are the normative implications of... We're getting very far afield. I would like to talk about ballot measures in Ohio, please. Okay, okay. We're going to come back to it, but...
Maybe that question I'll just pose to the listeners. What do you think of this new paradigm-ish, paradigm light where it seems— Well, we only have two data points, right? Right. I think that's right. Two years. You mean 2022 and 2023? No, two data points. We have Kentucky and Mississippi. Oh, interesting. I think we have more than that. I think we have two cycles where it doesn't seem like there's an overarching national environment that's driving voter behavior.
The other way to think about it is that we have a national environment that's driving a baseline behavior, and you have aberrations in some states. We can think about Pennsylvania or Florida in 2022 as contests where personalities really mattered. There are lots of other examples where those personalities didn't matter as much or not at all. So that's
When I was being an a**hole earlier and talking about state-level intercepts, that's what I was sort of getting at. There are no a**holes.
There's only statisticians. But you repeat yourself. Oh, you got my joke. I do want to make the point, because I'm sure there are a lot of listeners who are shouting at their screen right now being like, you know, like, it was a good night for Democrats. Like, why aren't you giving Democrats credit for, you know, like, you know, isn't this consistent with like a Democratic-leaning national environment? And like, right, I think I don't want to minimize that. I think that the...
and Mississippi obviously are like the like degree of overperformance of, uh, uh, over like presidential partisanship, for example, is, uh,
- Irrelevant. - Much more, right. It's like clearly there was more going on than like that it's a D+20 national environment and it's because of candidate quality. - Can I spin this a little bit though? And sorry to interrupt you, but should we think about the national environment not, or can we consider other parts of the national environment, not just the horse race top line, but what issues are in the sort of issue space of the national environment?
I'm just thinking if you think about it that way, Virginia House of Delegates races in the final weeks were saturated with Glenn Youngkin's anti-abortion sentiment in Virginia. And in that context, the race is part of a national – or those individual races are part of a national discussion about abortion. The same thing is true in Ohio where it was literally on the ballot. I mean –
Kentucky, again, if you want to view it through this lens, it's also about Biden's priorities, economic rebuilding, manufacturing sort of for the first time in ages in Kentucky. That's a national issue. So I don't want to get too far into the idea that all politics is local. Not that that's what you're saying, but just for the reader or listener. Yeah.
Yeah, I think that makes sense. I mean, the reality is that it's a point of emphasis. You can find...
national trends in the data from tonight. Like you really can. It's not all just aberrations. And you can also find state level specifics. Like we all, I don't know if you all watched Andy Beshear's acceptance speech. He didn't win an award. He won reelection. His victory speech, he talked about infrastructure, like first and foremost, which of course he can do only because of, in part, a bipartisan infrastructure bill that Joe Biden prioritized and signed.
But also, there's no reason to expect a Democrat in 2024 to win Kentucky.
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Okay, so let's look at Ohio specifically. You said you wanted to talk about ballot measures. Now abortion is codified into the state constitution there as well as legal marijuana. That is... Progressive utopia Ohio. That is now the latest in a string of victories for state ballot measures on the issue of abortion. Not a single one has gone...
in the direction of putting restrictions on abortion at this point, since Dobbs, right. At this point, our Democrats like, okay, this is, this is the issue we're running on in 2024. Um,
I think so. Certainly it's going to be a big part of it. Like, you know, there was some question about whether like, you know, Republicans were kind of trying to turn the script on Democrats in Virginia by they were actively campaigning on this 15 week abortion ban and saying that Democrats who like, you know, Democrats wanted to allow abortion right up to the point of birth and that that was the real extreme thing. And that doesn't seem to have
you know, to have really resonated. And yeah, I mean, Democrats ran on abortion in Virginia. Obviously, the Ohio measure was about it. Even Andy Beshear was, you know, was kind of attacking Daniel Cameron in Kentucky for saying that he was going to support a ban with no exceptions, which, of course, you know, that kind of rigid ban is unpopular even in red states. So I think certainly these results did nothing to dissuade Democrats from the idea that abortion is helpful for them.
Although we've seen in polling before that abortion is particularly salient for the kind of voters, this is to your point earlier, Elliot, to the kind of voters who are liable to turn out in an off-year election, people who are more keyed into politics in general, whereas more marginal voters or less regular voters will prioritize things like affordability, inflation, the economy, things like that. And so...
By the same token of like, oh, there aren't lessons from 2024, could Democrats learn the wrong lesson and think, oh, abortion is what's going to win us purple states or swing states, but really in a two-thirds turnout environment, the majority of Americans are more concerned about other things? Well, 2022 determined the same thing in Michigan with even higher turnout. So I think Democrats have a little more
on abortion than that lets on. I mean, it,
The other thing is they're able to be on the offense now. In 2019, Democrats arguing for a constitutional right to an abortion had to defend the status quo, Roe v. Wade nationally, and fight against very, very intense backlash from pro-choice activists and Republicans and national conservative activists.
political opinion leaders. Now they don't have to fight against that. They get to be the one saying, look at the status quo that's sort of taken your rights away from you. Look at these Republicans who are going to make things even worse for you. Why don't you just take the minimum step to allow, to put this right back into your state constitution? It's a more persuasive argument than the one they had before.
So let's talk about some of the numbers, which I've buried for being a 538 Politics podcast. We do numbers? We do numbers. So that abortion referendum passed with 56% yes, 44% no. When it comes to the Kentucky governor's race, Beshear had 52%—this is as of 10 p.m. Beshear had 52% of the vote. Cameron had 48% of the vote.
Mississippi, I don't think is worth reading at the moment. Right now, Tate Reeves has a majority. If he gets below 50%, there will be a runoff, but we expect him to be the leader in the polls there. How did the polls do tonight? They did well. Yeah, I think, you know. And why? And why? Because Trump wasn't on the ballot? I mean, maybe. Maybe.
That is still an operative theory. But no, overall, you know, as we mentioned off the top of the show, every race basically turned out the way we thought it was going to be. You know, Mississippi was, we don't know about, I guess, Mississippi yet because that race hasn't been called and it does look like it's going to be close. I would still probably think that Reeves will win, but maybe I'll look like an idiot in the morning. But you can blame me because it's my fault that we recorded that. Yeah, I can.
But yeah, Kentucky, you know, was kind of a lean D race. Virginia was was very close, but it looks like Democrats in the state Senate certainly are going to eke it out. So, yeah, it was you know, it was it was good to see another good year for the polls after they also had another successful year in 2022. But yeah, that also doesn't mean anything for their accuracy in 2024.
Yeah, I'm just seeing 538 didn't have a polling average in any of the contests tonight. But in Ohio, the polls right before the election showed about 58 percent.
of Ohioans were gonna vote for issue one, 57% voting for issue two. That's gonna be pretty close to where things end up, which I think is about 56% for both. - Yeah. - Maybe a little bit more for marijuana, if I'm remembering correctly. And in Kentucky, it really depends on how you average it. If you throw out all the partisan polls, it was about tied. If you do what FiveThirtyEight likes to do and take the partisan polls and adjust them based on your sort of guess for how biased they are, it's closer to Beshear plus three,
I don't know what that race is, but it's going to be about D plus three, plus four, maybe plus five, depending on those small precincts or big precincts in the Lake counties. So that was pretty good. You cannot always expect polls to be as bright as they were in 2022. You also probably shouldn't expect them to be as wrong as they were in 2020 or 2016. It's usually somewhere between those. So yeah, it looks like we're going to be at a,
Two or three percentage point error. That's like damn good for the pollsters. Snaps for pollsters. All right. Last question. We got we ended up getting into some maybe more abstract debates than specific results. Is there anything that anyone wants to shout out like a specific county or specific region?
House of Delegates race or Senate race in Virginia or key in on something that happened that we haven't discussed yet. This is your time to talk about whatever you want, Nathaniel. I mean, we don't have a call yet in projection yet in the Pennsylvania state Supreme Court race, but that's an important one for Pennsylvanians, but also potentially the 2024 election in terms of, you know, that's the court that could rule on things like the absentee voting law there.
Other races. I need to look at the state legislative special elections in more detail to see if there was any evidence of Democratic overperformance there because, of course, as we know, there has been Democratic overperformance in special elections up to this point, and I am curious to see if that continued.
outside of Rhode Island. Okay, it's getting late and we have Mississippi returns to continue to watch. So I'm going to leave things there for now. Thank you, Elliot and Nathaniel.
Thanks, Galen. Thanks, Galen. My name is Galen Druk. Tony Chow is in the control room, as is Cameron Tretavian. Our producers are Shane McKeon, Cameron Tretavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcast.538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with 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 tell a friend about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon. Bye.
