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My memoir is called "Middle Child at Disney World." Fun fact. Are you writing it? No, I've just had the title ready since I was like 12. So you're a middle child, I take it? Yeah, yeah. I am too, Leah. Wait, I am too? What? Jeff, are you also a middle child? No, I'm the oldest of two, so. Is this why we get along so well with everyone except for Jeff, obviously?
Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. We've got a lot to cover today. The pool of candidates running for president grew by one and shrank by one since the last time we talked. President Joe Biden got a little-known challenger in the Democratic primary in Dean Phillips, a congressman from Minnesota. And former Vice President Mike Pence suspended his campaign for president after struggling to get above the mid-single digits during his five-month-long bid.
Also, after three speakerless weeks in Washington, the House has a new speaker, Mike Johnson from Louisiana. So who is he and what will he do differently from Speaker Kevin McCarthy?
And we are just one week away from Election Day 2023. Yes, there are elections this November. We're going to preview two of the more high-profile contests. First, a referendum in Ohio that would codify a right to abortion until fetal viability in the state's constitution. And Virginia's state legislative races. With a Republican governor and House of Delegates, Republicans have a chance of winning a trifecta if they can flip the Senate next week.
And lastly, we're going to try something new. Stick around at the end and we'll have a roundup of some of the stories we didn't get to, according to the polls. Call it Polapalooza. And here with me to discuss it all is politics reporter Leah Askarna. Welcome to the podcast, Leah. Hey, Galen. Also with us is senior elections analyst Jeffrey Skelly. Hey, Jeff. Good morning, Galen. I almost said Dean because what we're going to talk about. Good God.
Yes, I did in fact change my name just in honor of a new entrance into the Democratic primary. Thanks for paying attention. Also here with us is congressional reporter at Politico, Daniela Diaz. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. So let's begin with the race for president. And let's begin with Mike Pence.
So he's out. He's the first of the well-known candidates to exit the Republican presidential primary. He was polling at about 4%, according to our averages. And anyone who's listened to this podcast already knows that we didn't really think he had a chance. So maybe the question here is not why he got out, but why he got out when he did. Jeff, do you have thoughts on that? Well, it's quite possible that he was going to not qualify for the third debate, which
in early November, you need 70,000 donors. And he had not announced that he had that. He did have the polls to qualify, but given that he got out and also we'd seen it as fundraising numbers overall that he was not raising very much.
It also could be just down to how do you keep your campaign going if you don't have the means, right? So with no real positive news to work off of as a candidate, it's not like he was going to be getting a surge in donations to keep things alive. So we've seen past candidates like Scott Walker in the 2016 cycle, for instance, dropped out. I think it was September. But this kind of vicinity when you realize your campaign –
just doesn't have the wherewithal to continue as sort of a combination of your trajectory in the race and your fundraising situation.
Daniela, you were an embed on Pence's team during the 2020 campaign when he was running for reelection as vice president. What's your sense of the reason he was running in this race to begin with? Like, did he genuinely think he could win? Or was he trying to make a point about the role he played in January 6th and trying to like secure his legacy as upholding his constitutional role and just have a platform to make that argument?
I think both of those statements are correct, Galen. When I covered him, it was before January 6th. He was a very strong voice defending Donald Trump at the time. Of course, Joe Biden won the election. January 6th happened. I was there on January 6th. I have very strong memories about what took place that day in the Capitol. And it was...
Really interesting to see him switch because he really did become someone that a lot of conservatives respected for speaking out against Donald Trump. And he he funded his whole campaign on that. And when I covered him, he was a strong, strong defender of Trump and really wanted Trump to win reelection and him continue to be the vice president. Now, what we saw was that his message didn't work for to become president.
It's difficult right now when there are so many other concerns that Americans have. January 6th happened years ago to run your campaign on that. People have short term memory. And we witnessed that that was just not strong enough for him to be prominent in this race and get the votes he needed and the funds he needed to keep going.
Well, and probably not the kind of message that a Republican primary elector is super interested in. Anyway, you said he was funding his campaign off of his messaging surrounding January 6th, but I'm sure a lot of that money was coming from people who, you know, might not usually vote in a Republican primary. So probably another challenge there. I'm curious here—
does he endorse? And if so, who does he endorse? Yeah, I mean, my instinct is Haley, if he were to publicly endorse anyone. They've agreed on the debate stage about many things, including, you know, the U.S.'s role in the Ukraine-Russia conflict, for instance. And Pence has been critical of Ron DeSantis as well. So it's not obvious to me that he would want to...
want to throw his support behind DeSantis. At the same time, I'm not sure Haley would want Pence's explicit endorsement only because she's trying to offer a conservative alternative to Trump without alienating Trump supporters. And she has a relatively strong favorability rating among Republican primary voters.
Even though she does not have the most cordial relationship with Trump, it's not nearly as toxic as the one that he has with Pence now after January 6th. But she served under him as UN ambassador, but then she's been somewhat critical of him. But she's trying to sort of walk a very narrow, difficult path now.
And so I'm not sure she would want Pence's actual public endorsement. But I'm sure she would love it behind the scenes and maybe for people who have given him money and people who have supported him to throw their weight behind Haley. Yeah, I would.
kind of think about it as process of elimination. I don't think he would endorse Trump, but I think it's definitely possible that he would vote for Trump if Trump won the nomination. So that's something to consider. But if you look at all the candidates, I'm looking at the 530 average. We have like a cool chart about who's ahead in the national polls. And if you add up all the candidates who are running on kind of
Critical of the Stop the Steal movement, supportive of the Integrity of Elections, all of that. I think the most vocal are Christie and Hutchinson, and Christie's at 3.1% on our average, and Hutchinson's at 0.7%. Together, that's 3.8%.
And that's also Pence's average right now is exactly 3.8%. So like if you combine all of the kind of Trump critical vote, you get to 7.6% on our average, which is not really enough. So I think Haley, who's at 8%,
probably needs all of the kind of anti-Trump vote, plus maybe some of the Ramaswamy vote. Pence does not like Ramaswamy from everything we've seen, neither does anybody else on that stage. We keep talking about narrowing the field and whether that can make room for an alternate to Trump, but I don't know if it's too late or if it was never going to happen, but it's just looking really tough right now.
All right. Well, the third Republican primary debate is happening next week, so we'll have plenty more time to talk about these dynamics. But let's move on and talk about the Democratic side. So Minnesota Representative Dean Phillips joined the primary last week. He's a businessman who's been in the House since 2019 after winning Minnesota's third congressional district, which is a suburban district around the Twin Cities, long represented by Republicans.
Biden's favorability nationally is low. It's at 40 percent, about exactly where Trump's was at this point in his presidency. And large numbers of Democratic voters say they want an alternative. But in Democratic primary polling, Biden gets more than 60 percent support, according to our average. So, Leah, what is Phillips's pitch to Democratic voters? Well,
Well, Dean Phillips, I think, accurately points to polling that shows Biden is not particularly popular with the electorate and that Democrats themselves aren't particularly excited about voting for him. Even though Biden is, you know, in a lot of polling we've seen kind of tying statistically with Trump. If you look at the actual statistics.
support, enthusiasm behind Biden and for that matter, the support, enthusiasm behind Trump. It's not really there. So Dean Phillips had been pushing for a while for a Democrat to enter the race against Biden and left open. You know, if he couldn't find somebody, he would run himself. What's wild about this
as somebody who covers the House, is like Dean Phillips. So he won this seat in 2018, the suburban Minnesota seat, flipped it, a Republican held it. Once the blue wave started forming, that district was just off the map. You know, like that was clearly a district that was going to be blue from now on. And then he kind of,
disappeared from the national radar. You know, so many of those other 2018 Democrats, you know, you think about, gosh, AOC came in that year and Abigail Spanberger, who's widely rumored to be running for governor of Virginia, Jared Golden, you know, like all of these folks
high profile Democrats who have made a splash. And Dean Phillips has kind of been in the background for the last five years and all of a sudden is running for president. And it's very confusing. Yeah. Danielle, as somebody who also covers the House, what is Dean Phillips's identity there that he probably hopes to transition into some sort of presidential message? Well, first of all, Dean Phillips was seen as a Democrat who had a good relationship with the press.
which is really interesting as he's trying to launch this presidential campaign as he has. It's getting a lot of coverage. Obviously, he has the only one that's primarying Biden. But also, he was seen as a centrist because he did flip a seat. And I've spoken to so many Democrats privately, House Democrats, that are so confused about why this is happening. They are privately...
that he's doing this. They're not going to support him. I'm not going to name so many names, but it's a lot of folks that you would picture to be allies of his.
saying that he shouldn't have done this. And he's offended a lot of people within the House Democratic caucus. It's a long shot bid. And he's trying to make a point about what's happening in the Democratic Party. But a lot of Democrats privately tell me that he could have done this differently. He's not even on the ballot in a lot of states, including Nevada. He missed that deadline to be on the Nevada primary ballot. So it's interesting to see how he's going to navigate these relationships with
within the House Democratic Caucus. They're back on Wednesday this week. He is going to have to talk to folks again. He's still in the House. He really has a lot of bad blood with his own colleagues on this. All right, Jeffrey, when Trump was running for re-election and had a few challengers within the Republican primary, you developed your own primary challenge success emitter with five different levels of threat in an incumbent-led primary.
Where would you place Dean Phillips in terms of his threat level to Biden today? I think it would be somewhere. So to be clear for listeners, there were there were five levels. Phillips strikes me as probably a level two threat.
threat at best. So this was someone who would make a splash. And the example there was Pat Buchanan in the 1992 Republican presidential primary, where he performed relatively well in New Hampshire, only lost by, I don't remember the exact percentage, but he held George H.W. Bush, the incumbent president, to something in like the low to mid 50s in the
That ended up being somewhat embarrassing for Bush, and some Republicans have viewed that as sort of the beginning of Bush's problems during the 1992 reelection campaign. So that to me is sort of where I would position him at this point. I don't think there's –
really a way to view him as someone who's like a Ted Kennedy, who I put at level three in 1980, who seriously threatened Jimmy Carter, or even more Ronald Reagan, a level four in 1976, running against Gerald Ford, which actually went to a convention battle. Neither candidate had a majority of delegates going into the convention locked up.
And then the level five, which has never happened, which was an incumbent president actually losing renomination in the modern presidential primary era, which goes back to the 1970s.
So, I mean, one advantage that Phillips has has little to do with himself and his own political identity, more to do with Biden. So according to the most recent sort of large scale poll that looked at this in a CNN poll by a two to one margin, Democrats said they preferred a presidential candidate other than Biden.
Now, in that same poll, there was no real consensus about who that other person should be. Only 18% named a specific person and 82% just said someone other than Biden. So with numbers like that, I mean, just the option of an alternative, an alternative who seems more viable, of course, Marianne Williamson is still running in the primary, RFK Jr. got out.
Dean Phillips is a politician, has a lot of money himself. I didn't mention this, but as a businessman. And he wasn't the founder of Talenti, but sort of one of the leaders of Talenti and the heir to a liquor distributor. So he's got a lot of money that he can throw behind his campaign. I mean, does the Biden side of the equation make him more viable? And if so, how viable? I don't think so.
Personally speaking to you, and of course, I'm coming at this from a congressional point of view. That's the beat I cover. But it seems that the Democratic Party, despite all of these polls, they are still very largely behind Biden. Right now, Democrats are very united, especially in the wake of seeing everything that's happening with Republicans. Their messaging is to stick together, to stick behind Biden and to continue supporting him through this. And Dean Phillips ruffled feathers.
The way you frame that is not how I would have framed it, but I find it really interesting. The idea about Democrats being united versus Biden being popular. I think that's like an interesting point that you're getting at because my sense, and I think I mentioned this earlier, is that, you know, Democrats aren't really behind Biden. He's not popular among Democrats and really popular among very many people right now. But you're absolutely right that Democrats are
definitely better than Republicans at getting behind a candidate and staying with them. Hence the last, you know, month on the Hill and the search for speaker. Even watching them try to be united around not even just a speaker, but the Republican primary.
And what we're seeing from some of their rhetoric, there's diehard Trump fans and then there are some that are really outspoken against Trump. So it's different seeing what's happening with Democrats, as you noted, Leah. Just a fundamental challenge for anyone taking on Biden is that he actually isn't unpopular among Democrats. I mean, his approval rating is close to 80 percent among Democrats, and it has been there throughout 2023. It has ticked down ever so slightly from like 80 percent at the beginning of the year to like 78 percent now in like an aggregate of polls.
He maintains a high approval rating among Democrats because they think he's done a perfectly adequate job as president. And now some of that is partisanship, keeping you in the president's camp, and that's stronger today than maybe it was for a lot of past presidents.
But at the same time, like it remains the case that Democrats largely approve of how he's handled his job. And I think a key problem for any challenger is that, yes, the Democrats are concerned about his age. But what are you challenging him on beyond that? And there's not like historically –
Most primary challenges of any note to a sitting president have involved some sort of fundamental issue or ideological disagreement, whether it was like Vietnam, the Vietnam War in 1968 with Eugene McCarthy challenging Lyndon Johnson, whether it's like ideological challenges from the right in 1976 with Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford or left with Ted Kennedy in 1980 against Jimmy Carter.
And then 1992, George H.W. Bush was maybe viewed as a little flaky to some of the most right-wing elements of the Republican Party. And Pat Buchanan was a critical observer of Bush and a conservative commentator who a lot of people are familiar with because he'd been in the White House under Nixon and Reagan. And so he was able to sort of grab hold of that a little bit and even previewed to some extent some of the things that we've heard from Donald Trump.
here many years later and a quarter century later. So where is that for Phillips? Is it the economy? I mean, he said that he doesn't want to actually be like openly critical of Biden and has applauded Biden's performance. So this is a very different sounding sort of presidential incumbent challenge than we have heard in past instances.
Right. Well, in some ways, you're describing a challenge for Dean Phillips. But in other ways, I wonder if you're describing an advantage because all of the primary challengers that you mentioned obviously lost. They were unsuccessful at unseating the incumbent for the nomination. And in part because you have to divide the party in a weird way to try to, you know, scrape away support from an incumbent president. And that's just going to be really hard.
But Dean Phillips isn't trying to do that from any kind of ideological angle. He identifies ideologically basically exactly with Joe Biden. His argument is just, but Joe Biden is old. And...
it seems like a large majority of Democrats, or at least a majority of Democrats and a large majority of the public, feel similarly. And so ideological fights may be dicey because of the way that you try to piece together a majority once you start that ideological fight. But if you're saying, hey,
you know, I also think Biden is doing a good job. I just don't think that he is spry enough to make it through the next cycle. Isn't that actually like an easier way to peel people away than challenging him from the right or left? I think maybe if you were Gresham Whitmer or Gavin Newsom and you could put together the sort of well-funded and if you were just a bigger name,
person, like maybe that candidate could make this really compelling. But a third-turned congressman from the Minneapolis suburbs is not that person. And so I mean, no, it's just fundamentally true. And so to me, it's like – and to Phillips' credit, I guess, in the scheme of this, it sounds like he tried –
to encourage someone like that, you know, someone, by the way, Whitmer, I think is co-chair of Biden's reelection campaign. So like, obviously that wasn't going to happen, but someone who has much more pull within the party and is viewed as someone who could run a really compelling national campaign. It sounds like he was looking for someone to do that before he actually actively got into the race himself, but Phillips just isn't that person. Yeah.
Right? So we're not going to, I guess, get an interesting test case of whether something that isn't like a major policy disagreement that motivates a whole bunch of people. Like I think what we're also looking for is like what motivates people to turn out and vote for this individual. Historically, it's been there's a disagreement of some kind.
And so in this case, you don't have that element. And so I do wonder about that. Right. You're spot on about the fact that he's not a big name. And I would also just plug in there that I would totally have a whole podcast episode just about whether Biden is popular among Democrats. Like, I know we just started talking about that and would like love to flesh that out anyway. Wait, what's it? We lay down a marker. Are you saying that he isn't popular?
I think where I'm getting stuck is enthusiasm versus popularity, right? Like how enthusiastic, and this is where I would want to have like a spreadsheet in front of me comparing numbers, and maybe Jeff already has that.
But I don't know. I really don't. Like my my kind of gut was like, no, he's especially like voters of color are do not seem particularly excited about him. It seems like he could lose support from Latino voters. And also, you know, his I mean, 80 percent within the party is good. But I don't know what that looks like compared to previous presidential incumbents this time of the cycle. Well, it's much higher than all the people I've been naming. Yeah.
Except George H.W. Bush. He's sort of in the same company as Bush was like mid 70s in terms of approval among your own party mates. But people before that, Carter's was like 50 percent among Democrats. You know, so like that's the other thing. Now, the other wrinkle here, though, is that we live in a more polarized partisan time and people are more locked into their camps. But at the same time, that's also like.
That's on the one hand a reason for concern for Biden supporters because, yeah, he could lose to Trump because we live in that world where – I think someone put it this way in some article I read recently. It's like, yeah, it starts out tied at 46 percent and then it's just a question of where everyone else goes. And that's totally true. That's both like good and bad for Biden in a sense. Like Biden could absolutely win. You don't have to actually be enthusiastic to cast a ballot anymore.
Were people that enthusiastic about voting for Biden in 2020? No. And we had the highest turnout ever, basically, in a presidential election, at least dating back to the voting age being lowered. So a lot of that was about Trump. And so then the question is, well, what will 24 be like? We could have some of the similar stuff, but at the same time, Biden's now the incumbent.
Is there pushback against him because people don't feel he's done a good job? Yeah. How much does Trump play into it? Anyway, there's like a million other questions, right? Yeah, a million other questions. We're going to save our full-on 2024 general election analysis for our one-year-out segment next week. But Leah, I think you were going to cap off
about Dean Phillips in particular? I was. Dean Phillips, Daniela said he's been friendly with the press, so I'm curious how she sees him. But I mean, members of the House are people. And most members of the House are kind of normal people who got, you know, who were in the right place at the right time and were talented. Yeah.
Maybe. But there are very few who are able to, like, who have that kind of, like, star personality that breaks through. And some of them do have it. But it's rare. And I think that's part of the reason why we don't see people go from the House to the presidency. But from what I remember interviewing Dean Phillips when he was still a candidate, so this is why I'm interested in what Daniela thinks, I don't remember thinking, like,
That's the next president of the United States. So I totally agree, Leah. I have known him for many years now, and I never thought once that this would be someone who would bounce to try to run for president. And I think that's why a lot of even his own colleagues thought that and are so shocked by it. Yeah, I mean, and for what it's worth, it's been I think it will have been actually 100 years since he
Someone whose last elected office was the U.S. House of Representatives was the nominee of a major party. And that was 1924. So it's been a while. Well, it'll be the 100 year anniversary, you know, perfect timing. All right. Let's move on to another little known lawmakers entrance onto the big stage. That is, of course, Mike Johnson, who is now speaker of the House.
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Last week, Representative Mike Johnson won the House speakership with unanimous support from Republicans after three weeks of heated disagreement over who should replace Kevin McCarthy. If you're thinking, who's Mike Johnson? You are not alone. A plurality of Americans say they don't know enough about him to form an opinion about Mike Johnson, according to recent YouGov polling. So, Daniela, let's begin with you. You've spent a lot of time in the Congress. Who is Mike Johnson?
Mike Johnson would describe himself as a Christian family values man from Louisiana who is dedicated to making the country a better place in his values, conservative values. He's in his fourth term in Congress, making him the least tenured speaker in more than 100 years. It's pretty shocking.
And but that's part of why he was able to get this. Look, you watch Steve Scalise fail. You watch Jim Jordan fail. And then this guy pops up who has no enemies only because he's a younger person who's been in Congress for less time and has had no time to make enemies and was never in a role to make enemies with members of Congress in his conference. So that is why he ascended to power and got the gavel.
And it probably helped a lot, too, that members were exhausted. Members hadn't seen their families. Members were ready to be done with this and getting a lot of pressure from their constituents for them to move ahead and start moving bills across the floor. But...
It's very interesting because it helps him that he's not a household name. Now he is. Even members of the press corps last week, one member who shall not be named, came up to me and said, I've never seen Mike Johnson in person working for a major outlet. That is really what this is going to be like for—he's someone who has never made a name for himself except for being the number seven Republican in the House GOP conference in the last year—
But he aligns himself with House Freedom Caucus members. He was part of the Republican Study Committee, the biggest committee in the House GOP conference that is conservative. He was chairman of that only in a second term. He slowly ascended into leadership, also with a good relationship with members of the press, without being major rabble rouser like some of his colleagues in these other conservative groups. So
He now, we're watching him in real time, have to lead this conference and change some of the views that he's had in previous years. For example, he's probably going to have to put a CR on the floor, a continuing resolution to fund the government at its current levels, or maybe a little raked back levels. But he is someone who didn't support that in the past. He didn't support Ukraine aid. He's been talking about that. It's different when you have to lead a GOP conference.
Jeff, let's talk about the numbers. Where does he fall within the Republican Party from a DW nominate score perspective? Because I think a lot of the coverage so far has been that he's quite far to the right. He led an amicus brief supporting arguments, legal arguments to overturn the 2020 election. He's been pretty conservative on abortion, LGBTQ issues, things like that. Numerically, where is he?
Well, he's sort of in the same vicinity as Steve Scalise using sort of the left-right dimension of DW Nominate, which we love. Political scientists enjoy using. But it's not – to be clear, I think you can't say anything is a perfect measure. But based on his roll call voting history in Congress, he is –
Kind of in the middle of the party, maybe slightly to the right of the center of the Republican Party, but is not in the farthest right realm of the Marjorie Taylor Greene's or the Chip Roy's or the Andy Biggs or what have you, or even the Jim Jordan's.
This is an interesting statistical measure, and it is highly useful. But if you're sort of nailing down sort of like critical things, I think CQ roll call used to have sort of like a critical votes measure or like important votes measure where you just sort of focused on the few things that got like the most attention. And, you know, Johnson voted against Trump.
certifying the 2020 election. But that's actually very much like kind of an average position in the Republican caucus. Two-thirds of the Republicans in the House on January 6th and into the 7th, because I know one of the votes was past midnight of 2021, voted against certification. So-
That's not really that shocking. And honestly, Tom Emmer, who had a lot of support after Jordan failed but did not have enough to actually go to the floor as the Republican nominee for speaker, he was actually one of the few – one of the only candidates for speakership on the Republican side who had voted to certify. So I think Johnson is conservative, and there are a lot of ways of looking at that, but he also is sort of representative of a more and more conservative caucus. Yeah.
If I could add, he not only voted against the 2020 to certify the 2020 election, he led that brief that Galen mentioned. And when I was at CNN, I covered that he emailed all members of the House UP conference asking them to sign on to that. He really is a strong supporter of former President Donald Trump. And he led that effort. And speaking to what you were saying, Jeff, about Tom Emmer, I spoke to Democrats who
were only open to helping Republicans sort through their mess unless it was someone that they put forward that certified the 2020 election. And Tom Emmer and Austin Scott at the time were the only ones that did that. Out of nine candidates, two out of nine, pretty, you're right, most of them supported overturning the election results. It's pretty notable that Mike Johnson was one of the lead members leading that effort.
Leah, one of the last times we talked about this conundrum of trying to fill the speakership position in the House, you mentioned that you didn't think it was going to be Jim Jordan because moderate Republicans in districts that Biden won in 2020 wouldn't stand for it because of the electoral liability he would pose. That ad is so easy to cut, you just say, you know,
so-and-so voted for Jim Jordan, who X, Y, and Z, this is the kind of Republican you would be voting, whatever.
So Mike Johnson is not Jim Jordan. He doesn't have the national profile of being this firebrand, rabble-rouser, what have you. But he also does hold non-majority views on things like, as we've mentioned, the 2020 election, abortion, even same-sex marriage, things that are pretty settled. Sure.
So do you think that he poses an electoral liability to moderate Republicans who did? Every Republican voted for him. Jim Jordan had been extensively vetted by the national media and had beyond his positions in Congress, which, I mean, he is one of the most visible members of Congress, even if he's not speaker, also obviously had his own controversies at home in Ohio. Mike Johnson...
had not been vetted. Now we're seeing Democratic groups. We're seeing some opposition research, you know, released on him usually about his past homophobic comments. I don't know if that message has been getting through so far. First off, there have been so many other things happening on the national stage that
I don't know if Democrats have a plan to have a messaging campaign around him because I don't think it's going to happen naturally. I don't think it's going to happen through the media. What we're seeing is mostly through Twitter. So all that's to say, Mike Johnson is definitely less of a risk because he's not as well known. People don't, I mean, people won't,
and automatically think of that time they saw him on TV. That said, he assumed office in 2017. He, as far as I know, has not had a supremely competitive election to get to his place and has not been vetted yet.
So, you know, and again, like this is me coming from the point of view of somebody who's like focused on campaigns and elections and like the thing that gets candidates is when they are not vetted. And so I would like to see the next couple months play out and see, you know, first off, if it's just a question of Democratic messaging, in which case I think Mike Johnson can absolutely survive that. But also, you know, what what do news reports come out? What kind of what do we see about him come out over the next few months?
Danielle, what comes next for Mike Johnson in terms of the challenges that he has to overcome in moving legislation forward? Like, what's going to be different about his speakership than Kevin McCarthy's?
Well, first of all, this is the most prominent position he's ever been in. Meanwhile, McCarthy was minority leader, so he kind of knew when he became speaker how to navigate these relationships within leadership on both the Democratic side and the Republican side. Johnson, for the first time, is learning what it means to be someone who has to start interacting with other members in leadership and even senators. For example, Susan Collins, the top
ranking member in the Appropriations Committee on the Senate side. Remember, Appropriations decides the funding that goes into all these departments. She didn't know who he was. When asked about Mike Johnson becoming Speaker, she said, who's that? And she's a Republican Senator. So he's having to build a lot of relationships that McCarthy already had when he came into power. Not only that, but he now has to lead a conference of different factions, right? There is a reason why Republicans—and Leah can really speak to this as well—
covering campaigns, there's a reason why Republicans have the majority right now, and it's because they were able to flip some seats. And so there are some moderate centrist Republicans in blue districts that are facing tough reelections that are going to have to make some tough votes. And they have a razor-thin majority in the House. Mike Johnson is going to have to give them the space and the room to make those votes.
And so I think it's going to be very difficult for him as someone who has aligned himself more with more conservative members of the party to have to give centrists room on certain votes, something McCarthy was very good at. That's why it wasn't the centrists revolting against McCarthy. It was the conservatives.
Mike Johnson has conservatives support. He's going to really have to build those relationship with the centrists, the ones that helped Republicans win the majority. It's going to be really interesting because he's going to have to give them the votes they need to keep their seats if they want to keep the majority. For example, a lot of them support Ukraine aid.
They separated those two bills and are going to move Israeli aid on the floor on Thursday. They are saying they're offsetting that bill for $14.5 billion and going to take that money out of another pocket. It's going to be a really huge challenge for him to figure out how to navigate leadership. And also, he's not an appropriator. And...
He is now going to have to deal with appropriations, something he's promised these conservatives that he's going to do on the House floor, is move these 12 appropriations bills, cut spending to cut the deficit. And he has no experience in this prior, except for maybe being on that House Judiciary Committee and working to impeach Biden, which is what he was doing leading up to this. So he's got a lot of challenges on his plate. And
And he's only talking to conservative media right now. So we don't really know exactly. No one's really challenging him on these questions. And we don't really know where he's standing on a lot of these issues. He's not talking to the press like McCarthy did in the hallways. So a lot of question marks here, and especially leading up to the funding of the government, which is expected to run out on November 17th.
All right. Well, we will follow along and see what happens along with the rest of the country then, I guess. But let's move on to Election Day 2023. And we're going to say goodbye to Daniela. Daniela, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you, guys.
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We've already talked plenty about the 2024 election, but Election Day 2023 is just a week away. Some of the notable contests include a referendum on abortion in Ohio, state legislative races in Virginia and New Jersey, governor's races in Kentucky and Mississippi, a special election in Rhode Island, and mayoral races in cities around the country. Today, though, we're going to focus on Ohio and Virginia, and we're going to be back next week with more. But let's start with Ohio.
The politics of abortion have shifted pretty decisively since the Dobbs decision last year. We've seen a number of referendums come down on the side of a right to abortion, even in red states since then. Ohio is putting it to voters to decide whether the state should have a right to abortion through fetal viability, which is generally 24 to 28 weeks. So, Leah, does it look like that constitutional amendment is going to pass?
That's the question. So if we look at polling, it's been pretty minimal. And what we've seen so far is a kind of range by how much this amendment does pass. You know, I'm looking at like literally like
three polls right now, and it's passed by different margins. What's really hard about trying to figure this out, first off, the language of the ballot is different from the language of the amendment itself. So that term you just used, like fetal viability, that is either exactly or close to the terminology used in the amendment. It is not the terminology used in the ballot. And the ballot is
they use the term unborn child. There are a handful of other kind of complicating factors
We don't know what turnout is going to look like. So the polling that we have seen, like, you know, if we're looking at two or three different polls, does that really capture every potential turnout scenario that could happen in an off-year election in Ohio? The other thing is that this is actually issue one. And you might remember that issue one was what voters were voting on in August in Ohio, which was that ballot measure that would increase voters
the required portion of the vote to pass a constitutional amendment from 50% to 60%, it was widely seen as a vote on abortion access because we knew this November vote was going to come up. But that was called Issue 1, and pro-choice activists said, vote no for Issue 1. And now it's November, and pro-choice activists are saying, vote yes for Issue 1 because Issue 1 is just what it's called on the ballot. So
So in general, Ohio, what we've seen in polling, generally supports some abortion rights, supports abortion being legal in many, if not most cases. But does that come through in the actual votes? That's the question. Yeah.
And what are the margins at the moment? There was one poll conducted by Suffolk University in July that found 58% of Ohio voters would support it. However, that was in July before the final wording of the ballot was approved. So it uses wording in the question that is no longer going to be on the ballot. So 58% might be slightly inflated.
Baldwin Wallace University conducted a poll just earlier this month, also found 58% of
voting yes on the proposed amendment. And then, oh, this is actually an interesting one. Ohio Northern University recently conducted a poll. They found it passing at 52%, but they tested two different scenarios or two different sets of language, the proposed language and the actual language. The language that will appear on the ballot passed at 52%. The proposed language passed with 65%.
So it looks like, you know, 52% is kind of the floor from this very small amount of polling, which is probably a little close for comfort for the pro-choice side of this. That said, it could be a blowout. You know, like if we're looking at 58 to 65%, depending on wording, like there's a broad range of where this could fall.
This is sort of interesting. Data from 2022 suggests that, you know, two-thirds of Ohioans support abortion in all or most cases.
And that's a higher percentage than all but one other state that went for Trump in 2020, that other state being Alaska. And in fact, support for abortion in all or most cases is stronger in Ohio than in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which both went for Biden in 2020. So when we think about Ohio, it's an increasingly red state.
But it also has stronger support for abortion in all or many cases than some even swingier states or even blue states. In the August vote on raising the constitutional, like raising the amount of support you needed to pass a constitutional amendment via ballot measure to 60 percent,
Some formerly blue-leaning areas in like the Mahoning Valley, for instance, did vote no by solid margins even as these are places that have shifted toward Republicans and even gone heavily Republican in some cases in the Trump era. That to me makes me just wonder if there's just some latent cross-pressuring on issues where they haven't – or people who have shifted toward the Republican camp.
haven't necessarily gotten more conservative on some social issues. And, you know, do recall that in 2016, when Trump first appealed to some voters who had previously voted for Barack Obama, for instance, he wasn't viewed as the conservative candidate, like the most conservative guy in the Republican primary, right? That sort of transition has happened over time. But in 2016, you know, that was like Ted Cruz. Donald Trump was seen as the more moderate alternative. So if I'm sort of thinking about like
What could be going on? You could have some voters who have shifted into the Republican camp in Ohio still holding on to maybe a more moderate view on social issues that might cause them to be inclined to not vote in favor of restricting abortion to a greater extent or to vote against restricting abortion to a greater extent.
And it seems like Trump is trying to, amongst his rivals in the Republican primary, position himself more moderately on the issue of abortion. Is Trump unique in that
Because I'm looking at polling from Gallup, and it shows that support for abortion under certain circumstances has increased amongst Republicans since the Dobbs decision. So in 2021, 54% of Republicans said it should be legal under certain circumstances. Today, that number is 66%.
And in terms of legal, illegal in all cases, that shifted from 20% in, you know, for the decade preceding the Dobbs decision to now only 14% in 2023, saying it should be illegal in all cases.
So it sounds like Trump is, you know, paying attention and following suit. Are other lawmakers like how are Republicans in Ohio who maybe hope to win election as well in 2023 or 2024 talking about this issue?
It's so interesting because there's a major shift. So on one hand, there are ads opposing issue one that say even if you're pro-choice, even pro-choice or pro-life, this is too far for you.
There's an ad with a mom being shut out of her daughter's room while her daughter is deciding on her own whether she wants to have an abortion. There were a lot of ads earlier on about how this would open the door for gender-affirming surgery that
kids could have without parental consent, which is not in the amendment. And I mean, even the ad from there's an ad with the governor, Mike DeWine and his wife, just like looking to the camera and being like, I understand this is a divisive issue, but this this amendment just goes too far.
But then you also have like another segment of, I guess there's a bit of a divide between the kind of ads that are kind of like a suburban mom, sometimes literally labeled in the ad, like,
Columbus mom, you know, like kind of like collared shirt, you know, just like looking at the camera, just talk, you know, just like oozes suburban mom energy and very calmly telling the camera that they're concerned about their children versus some more extreme messaging. That's like this. This amendment will make your children, you know, change their gender.
Yeah, I mean, I think that actually is something of a the realization among some on the right that this is a bad issue for them now politically. And so they are now recasting it as Democrats are going too extreme on abortion.
Instead of maybe going all out on a we're defending life kind of messaging angle, they are trying to say, look at Democrats trying to be so extreme on abortion. We're trying to find like – and we can talk about this in the Virginia race, but trying to –
we're trying to find a common sense position on abortion or or however you want to phrase it uh kind of thing instead of and democrats are too extreme on this and they want abortion all the way to you know the the the very end of term or what have you and the fact that they would like that republicans would link this also to uh concerns about like transgenderism uh makes sense it's sort of a similar sort of uh there's an extremist thing going on and and we're against it
Well, to that point, Jeffrey, let's move to Virginia. Republicans control the governor's mansion. Of course, Glenn Youngkin won in 2021 and the House of Delegates, and they have a shot of winning a trifecta if they can take the Senate. How likely is that? Versus, of course, there's also the possibility that Democrats win the House of Delegates.
It seems really up in the air right now. I think you would make Democrats slight favorites in the state Senate, the upper house, which has 40 members. Currently, Democrats have a 22 to 18 seat advantage there. And it's
Just sort of race by race, it seems like they have maybe a clearer path to 21 seats and an outright majority. One thing to keep in mind is because there are an even number of members there. Lieutenant Governor Winsome Sears, who is a Republican who was swept in with Yunkin
in the 2021 gubernatorial election, she, though separately elected, I should say, Virginia separately elects Lieutenant Governor from governor, she would break ties in a 2020 case. So Republicans just need to get to 20 seats. Now, all of this is happening while redistricting has finally come into effect, essentially. The new maps drawn after the 2020 census, this is the first election where they are in effect redistricting.
the redistricting process in Virginia took about as long as it could. This has shifted the playing field to some extent, not to necessarily any party's single advantage, but you have basically like a quarter of Senate seats
are open with no incumbent running in them. And in the House of Delegates, which has 100 members, you have a third of those seats with no incumbent. So it's really scrambled the map and who is running to a great extent. And in the House of Delegates, it's a close, it's a really close race. And Republicans might be able to hold on to their narrow majority. They won 52 of the 100 seats in
in 2021 while with Youngkin at the top of the ticket. The Senate was not up in that election. That's a key thing with Virginia. They have four-year terms in the Senate and are not up at the same time as the governor election. So it's very much up in the air. Why should
you know, we're talking about state legislative races here. Why should listeners outside of Virginia care what happens in Virginia on Tuesday? And I guess maybe from an elections perspective, like,
Do we think that this is going to give us some sense of the national environment, a national environment about which the data has been pretty muddy? Or are there like significant changes that could happen to Virginia? Does this shape Glenn Youngkin's career? Like what what is at stake here, really, from your perspective?
Well, obviously, we just talked about the abortion constitutional amendment in Ohio, and that, I think, is probably the most far-reaching potential consequence of the election in Virginia. So Virginia is the only state in the South that has not made some sort of notable –
shift toward a more restrictive abortion policy in state law. And that's in part because Democrats hold the state Senate there and they have blocked attempts by Glenn Youngkin and Republicans in the legislature to pass a 15 week ban. Currently, Virginia's law
Essentially, abortion is permitted up until about 26 weeks, with some exceptions beyond that in case of like the mother's life and some other exceptions. But 26 weeks, obviously, and 15 weeks are pretty dramatically different. Youngkin and Republicans have pushed 15 weeks as sort of, as I said earlier, like a kind of a common sense thing we can all agree on kind of position, and that Democrats are more extreme for trying to push back on that.
essentially is the angle that they've taken there. So I think abortion is the main thing, because if Republicans do get full control of the state legislature and Glenn Youngkin's in the governor's mansion, they will be in a position to pass a 15-week ban. So that's like probably the most obvious policy implication, along with many other things that the state Senate has blocked Republicans from doing. But that's like the most notable, like
Like obvious policy consideration. And then, of course, there's Glenn Youngkin's, you know, will he run for president talk? And in theory, if Republicans have a good night, maybe that would that would encourage him to just jump in late against Donald Trump and try to be the kind of white knight riding in to save the day for the GOP or something, which some Republican donors seem to think is a thing. Or I should say the white knight with a red vest because he's really into his red vest.
riding in to save the day and stop Trump from being the Republican nominee, which is a little insane, to be clear. Like my view of that is that it's bonkers to think that he would succeed. But perhaps a strong Republican performance could could be the you know, could precipitate him saying, screw it, let's go.
Abortion is one of the issues at play here. But when Glenn Youngkin originally ran for governor back in 2021, this was before Dobbs. So it wasn't an issue that he campaigned on. Probably not an issue that he would be excited to campaign on. No. But it was a lot about critical race theory, parental rights and education, abortion.
And since that time, we've also seen an increase in voters' concern about things like crime and affordability and so on. So it sounds like Democrats would maybe like to make the race in Virginia about abortion. What would Republicans like to make it about? Oh, well, I think you're absolutely right that Democrats, abortion is their number one issue. They are leaning into that heavily. There was a
at impact, their tracker of the subject matter in ads. I think it was like something over 40% of Democrats' ads mentioned abortion as of late September, which was like far and away the number one issue. On the Republican side, education is a leading issue because – and clearly it's with a thought of, well, let's look at what happened in 2021.
Glenn Youngkin narrowly wins the governorship. He campaigned in part. We're coming off of sort of the deepest, darkest period of COVID.
mask mandates, parental rights in education, COVID school, like all these things, people sort of maybe getting a closer understanding of just what was going on in day-to-day school because their kids were at home on their laptop on Zoom all day doing it. And so this was very fresh on people's minds and they were worried about it. And Youngkin was saying, you know, we need to expand parental rights in education. It also related, but also more
in the bailiwick of the sort of conservative base of the party, the critical race theory concerns were sort of maybe at their height around that time. And so together, you know, these were things energizing people to either turn out and vote in a gubernatorial election or to vote Republican, even if they were sort of, you know, even potentially Biden voters, for instance, in 2020. So that is still definitely a big concern, like in polling, education ranks very highly.
There was a Washington Post, George Mason's Schar School poll that found that 70 percent of voters said that education was very important to their vote. And abortion, for instance, was like 60 percent. And the economy was 68 percent. So education is still very much top of mind. Now, in that same poll –
Slightly more voters said that they thought Democrats would do a better job than Republicans on education, but it was pretty close. And I think the thing to keep in mind here is that Democrats – this used to be an issue I think where Democrats had sort of a firmer hold on things like education was a democratic issue.
Whereas like, you know, in the grander national scheme, like national security was more of a Republican issue. The problem for the Democrats is that they have maybe lost that hold or as firm a hold that they had on education as a sort of a core Democratic led issue. What I'm interested in, in 2021, when Youngkin won the governor's office, he was credited, like Jeff said, as this, he's figured out the secret sauce for suburban Republicans in a post-Trump world.
Did he? And I think one question is, did anything change after Dobbs? Obviously, things did. But did it become tougher for Youngkin? And then two, how much did Youngkin benefit from just happening to be running while Biden's numbers plummeted after a brief honeymoon period at the beginning of his presidency, running against Terry McAuliffe, who so closely aligned himself with Biden?
All right. Well, we'll see. Leah and Jeff, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you. Hey, thanks for having us, Galen. Before we go, we're trying something new today. It's a rundown of some of the other stories in the news that we didn't get to. But, of course, in FiveThirtyEight fashion, we're adding some context through polling. We're calling it Pollapalooza, but write in if you have a better name. So,
Last Wednesday evening, a mass shooter in Lewiston, Maine killed 18 people, injuring 13 others. The suspect, Robert Card, used an assault-style weapon and had a recorded history of mental illness. He was found dead after a two-day-long manhunt on Friday. A YouGov poll conducted last Thursday after the shooting asked people what was more important, the right to own guns or protecting people from gun violence. 34% said the right of people to own guns. 57% said protection from gun violence.
Those numbers roughly match Gallup's polling on the question of whether gun laws should be more or less strict. A Pew Research poll conducted over the summer found that 60% of Americans say that gun violence is a very big problem in the U.S. 38% of Republicans thought that gun violence was a very big problem, compared to 81% of Democrats who thought the same.
Over the weekend, Israel expanded ground operations in Gaza. YouGov polling released last Thursday found that the swell of pro-Israel sentiment that followed Hamas's October 7th attack has faded slightly as the war continues. 41% of Americans sympathize most with Israelis. That is down seven points from the 48% who said so the week before.
The share of Americans who say they sympathize with both sides equally is 28%, up five points from the previous week's poll, and the share of Americans who sympathize more with the Palestinians increased slightly to 13%. The same poll also found that 67% of Americans think the Israel-Hamas war is likely to expand to a wider war, or that it already has.
Also, last Wednesday, North Carolina's Republican-held legislature approved a new congressional map that may help the GOP pick up three or more seats in next year's House elections. That could help Republicans maintain their narrow House majority next year.
And finally, something more fun. Spooky season is upon us. According to Google's Fright Geist search function, which uses Google Trends technology to guess which costume will be most popular in 2023, the top five Halloween costumes this year are in order from number five to number one is number five, fairy. Number four, witch. Number three, Spider-Man. Number two, princess. And number one, Barbie.
But be careful out there. According to July Ipsos polling, 39% of Americans believe in ghosts. Additionally, 28% say they have woken up from sleep with the sense of a strange presence in the room.
With that, my name is Galen Drew. Tony Chow is in the control room. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Trotavian. And our intern is Jayla Everett. 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 will see you soon. Bye.
