Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad. Reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lipson Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a reproduced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Lipson Ads. Go to LipsonAds.com now. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N-Ads.com.
American Association of Public Opinion Researchers, right? Nailed it. You think, oh, APOR is kind of nerdy. It's going to be more buttoned up. But I kind of think that people are staying up until like 2 o'clock in the morning at the bar. People definitely are staying up until 2 o'clock in the morning at the bar. Okay. All right. All right. Okay. Assumptions confirmed. Does this make you more or less likely to attend next year?
Yeah, I'm more likely to come down next year. Okay. Yeah, Galen, you want to go together? Road trip? Yeah. Nathaniel, did you just ask me to go to Aport with you next year? I did, Galen, and he said yes.
Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. And it's election day. If there's one thing you've probably learned listening to this podcast, it's just how often that can be the case in the U.S. So on Tuesday, voters are heading to the polls in at least three competitive races. There's the Republican primary in Kentucky that will determine who faces off against popular Democratic Governor Andy Beshear. There's the Democratic primary for Philadelphia mayor
and a general mayoral election in Jacksonville, Florida, which is the most populous American city led by a Republican. Also, last week was a big week for simmering scandals coming to the fore. Former President Donald Trump was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming former magazine writer E. Jean Carroll, and New York Congressman George Santos was indicted by federal prosecutors. So how is the public reacting? Do scandals still matter?
But before we get to any of that, we have what I believe is a first for our good or bad use of polling segment. So last week's main character in the polling universe was a poll about trust in media from YouGov. And here with us to talk about it is senior data journalist from YouGov herself, Lindley Sanders. Welcome to the podcast, Lindley.
Thanks, Galen. Excited to be here for this first. Excited to have you. Also here with us is senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich. Hey, Nathaniel. Hey, Galen. Hey, Lindley. Welcome. So let's dive right into this. This poll asked Americans to rank 56 different news outlets from very trustworthy to very untrustworthy.
And the results showed that Americans most trustworthy outlet by a long shot is the Weather Channel. Then comes PBS, then the BBC. The least trustworthy was InfoWars, followed by the Daily Caller, then Breitbart News.
The crosstabs also revealed how Democrats and Republicans viewed the outlets and overall Democrats trusted news media much more than Republicans. The only outlets that Republicans trusted more than Democrats were Newsmax, One America News, Fox News, The Federalist, Breitbart News, and Infowars.
Notably, Democrats reported having more trust than Republicans in three of the traditionally right-leaning sources included, which were The Wall Street Journal, The National Review, and The Washington Examiner. So, Lindley, I feel like you're kind of a biased source here. I have to assume that your position is that this is a good use of polling, considering that your organization conducted the poll. But if you want to go on record saying otherwise, please feel free to. But maybe more broadly, what was the goal of this poll?
Yeah, on the record, I'd say it's a very good use of polling. Fantastic. Honestly, 10 out of 10. There's never been a better use of polling.
Yeah, the objective was to see what Americans thought, what the general public thinks about popular news outlets, and to see the difference between how Democrats and Republicans view certain ones. So I think your summary of the results was very spot on. Oh, thank you. I'm flattered. What was your main takeaway from all of the data that you collected?
Yeah, my main takeaway was that there are very few media outlets that both Democrats and Republicans trust. And then obviously, like you said, there's a big overall trend where we see Democrats trusting media overall at a much higher rate than Republicans do. I'm not sure that anything was particularly shocking to me because this was really similar to what we saw in a poll that we did on this last year. The Weather Channel was at the top of that ranking and the Weather Channel remains at the top of this ranking.
So Nathaniel, not to put you on the spot here in front of Lindley, um, but, uh, was this a good or bad use of polling by your estimation? Galen, I believe this is what they call in the biz social desirability bias. Uh, you know, I, I don't want to offend our guest here. Um, but I would never be offended. Um, I, I, I thought this was a good use of polling though. Um,
Yeah, I mean, it was very interesting. And I think there was a reason that it got, you know, kind of so widely shared when it came out last week, which is that I think, you know, a lot of us know intuitively that Democrats trust kind of traditional mainstream media more than Republicans do. But it was really striking to see, you know, the graph in particular that has the blue dots and the red dots and how far away they were on the
uncertain measures and to see certain media outlets have such big gaps like CNN, for example, had had
an even bigger gap than MSNBC does. Like that was interesting. New York Times also has a big gap and seeing, you know, also kind of some of the counterintuitive things that you mentioned, Galen, like, you know, Democrats trust the New York Post a bit more than Republicans do. And I think that really speaks to how kind of down on mainstream media Republicans are. Again, as you mentioned, the only ones where Republicans are
trusted them more than Democrats were these, you know, kind of very dyed-in-the-wool conservative sources. In terms of some of those smaller right-wing leaning outlets that we talk about, I mean, if you rank the
45 outlets by the difference between Republican and Democratic net trust scores. So the ones that are most relatively trusted by Republicans, they still rank in the top 10 for Republicans. So I understand people pointing that out as something that might be a counterintuitive finding. I would say those outlets are still among the most relatively trusted by Republicans, and they're still toward the bottom of Democrats list.
So places like the National Review or Washington Examiner? Yeah, and Daily Caller.
And it's also worth saying here that like, it's not actually shocking to me that Democrats would trust the National Review more than Republicans. And I don't think that's just like Democrats blindly trusting all media sources and Republicans blindly distrusting all media sources. It's more like if you actually pay attention to what the National Review is, it's been pretty critical of Democrats
over the past, what is it now, like seven years and was like pro-impeachment and after January 6th was like, we got to get rid of this guy, whatever. Like that's out of touch with mainstream view within the Republican Party. So it may suggest that the public is seeing some nuance in what these sources actually represent. Sure. And I think to Lindley's point, you know, when you rank media outlets by an order of how much Democrats trust them, those outlets are still toward the end. Yeah.
But I do think it's a mix. So like, you know, like the New York Post, I'm not sure you would say that they, you know, have anything really to redeem them for Democrats, other than it kind of vaguely sounds like, you know, reputable, right? It's a combination of New York Times and Washington Post. Yeah.
And I do think there's probably an element of some people were responding based on kind of vibes. And, you know, Democrats were like generally inclined to to say that they trust media sources, even if they weren't super familiar with them. And Republicans were generally inclined to say that they distrusted them, even if they weren't super familiar with them. Nathaniel, you don't trust Page Six.
I don't have a snappy reply to that, Galen. Okay, wait. But what you're saying, Nathaniel, actually gets at a criticism that the media columnist at Politico, Jack Schaefer, pointed out. And I invited him on the podcast. He declined to be here, but I will read a little of what he wrote. He wrote,
What's lacking here is any assurance that those being surveyed are familiar enough to accurately rate the outlets they've been asked to judge. Almost nobody, not even press critics, keeps a close enough tab on 56 outlets, at least a dozen of which are paywalled or require a cable subscription to render a fair appraisal of all of them.
We all consume media in our own bubbles. And even though the survey, to its credit, has removed from its calculations responses who say an outlet is neither trustworthy or untrustworthy or answer that they don't know, we have no way of knowing how many of the 1,500 respondents took wild, uninformed stabs at rating the outlets.
So how do you address that, Lindley? Yeah, I think it's a fair question. I like Jack as a writer, and I think that polling is ultimately made better when people ask tough questions, so I appreciated it. We love you, Lindley. That is what we're all about here at FiveThirtyEight.
That said, I think that his argument that the poll lacks assurance that those who are being surveyed are familiar enough with these outlets to have an opinion of them doesn't necessarily ring true for me.
Like you said, we asked this question with a six point scale. You could say you were neutral in an outlet. You could say don't know. And the data shows that people use the don't know response pretty liberally, which we kind of take to mean either you don't have an opinion of it or you're not familiar with the outlet. I definitely think that people can have opinions of media outlets without personally reading or watching it. And I think that
especially in today's world where people take their cues from sort of partier media elites. We see that happen more and more. Like our data indicates that there isn't a huge share of Democrats who are regularly watching Fox News, but almost all of them have an opinion on Fox News. And we see the same thing on the other side where not a lot of Republicans are consuming MSNBC or CNN, but they still definitely have an opinion on whether or not it's trustworthy.
So I get his argument that some outlets deserve to be higher than others. But since this was a national poll of general public opinion, I think that there's value in kind of seeing what everyone has to say as opposed to just the especially media literate public.
Right, because I guess if you actually tried to pull only people who pay attention to these outlets, like even Fox News, their highest rated show is getting 3 million viewers a night. So like you would have to really, really dig to find enough people to give...
an opinion of all of these different sources, right? Yeah. And then who are we cutting out? You know, maybe people who aren't as educated, maybe people who don't have as much familiarity with some of the lesser known outlets. Well, then is the question this poll is really answering sort of like brand recognition or awareness as opposed to trustworthiness? Because can you not trust something if you don't know really what it is or what it's broadcasting?
So the net trust scores don't account for people who don't have an opinion of it. So those are really just looking at people who say it's either trustworthy or untrustworthy. So I don't think that it's just measuring name ID. If you go and you sort the outlets by the share who say don't know, you can probably get a better sense of familiarity from that. But I think the trust scores kind of stand on their own for showing how people view these outlets.
Yeah, I think, you know, that criticism that you read Galen, I think it misses the fact that like, you know, I think probably the vast majority of people who consumed this poll just saw that that specific chart on Twitter or some other social media site on, you know, blue sky or whatever. But but the way to be inclusive. Exactly. Got to hedge my bets Galen.
But, you know, you can click on the PDF at the bottom of the article that Lindley wrote and see the don't know answers like that. Those numbers are there. So that criticism didn't really ring true for me. But like for the other part, like they don't necessarily know anything.
if X outlet is trustworthy and that they're kind of reacting more generally. Like I find that interesting itself. Like I was saying before, like the fact that Democrats are so much more likely to trust the media. And I think that by asking about specific outlets, you get more, like it's more revealing than if you had just asked a generic question of like, do you trust the media? Because the media can mean different things to different people. And I think that is the type of poll we would say on this podcast is like a bad use of polling because people can read into it.
And here, like, maybe we don't like, you know, literally take the daily caller numbers like at face value. But like the fact that Democrats are ahead of Republicans is interesting itself. I think about what it means more broadly, in addition to this poll giving us, I think, interesting information about the media outlets that are better known, like the Weather Channel or CNN or Fox News.
So what kind of patterns can we pick up here in terms of the types of outlets that are trusted more? Like, say we wanted to design a world where folks were more inclined to trust the media and we were looking for people
patterns amongst the top ranking sources, which I read three of them, but the ranking is The Weather Channel, PBS, the BBC, then Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the Associated Press, then ABC, hey, then USA Today, then CBS, Reuters, NBC, Time Magazine, The Washington Post, NPR, it goes on down from there. What should we take from that? Don't talk about politics or don't be seen as partisan.
Just cover the weather. Wait, we're not supposed to talk about politics and we want to be trusted? The number one choice is the Weather Channel. Talk about the weather. Well, and then what's the second lesson, which is like talk about the royal family? I don't know, like the BBC? So I think... So it's interesting, right? Like...
PBS and the BBC, and you can like kind of throw the AP into this category too. Well, I'll talk about PBS and the BBC. Like those are like thought of as like kind of official news sources or like part of public access, right? Like, and I think that that has a certain...
to it, even though Republicans... Well, actually, Republicans were slightly net positive even on PBS, which was a little surprising. But I think that that gives organizations some credibility. And I can't quite put my finger on why the... I can't. Okay, go for it. When people say...
that they are positive on PBS, they're also talking about local news. And so because everyone experiences PBS differently in America. In fact, most people who are watching network news also experience it differently or whatever. And there's much higher trust in local news than there is in national news across the country. They don't measure this specifically in this poll. But if you look at other polls, because so often what they're reporting is once again, as Lindley said, nonpolitical stuff.
like crime or local heroes or the weather or what have you. I think that's fair on the non-political stuff, but I don't think that explains why PBS and BBC are significantly higher than ABC and CBS and NBC. And in fact, the BBC for American audiences is the opposite of local news, right? And maybe there's a benefit there to being seen as totally removed from the American context.
But nonetheless, they are not talking about national American politics. It's as soon as you talk about national American politics that people know. Okay, Lindley, who's right here? Okay.
Well, I do think that a lot of the outlets that we see being most divisive for Republicans and Democrats are the ones that are frequently the boogeyman or attacked by national political figures. We mentioned CNN, The New York Times and MSNBC all being the most divisive for Democrats trusting them way more than Republicans. And why might that be the case is probably because
they've had years of being attacked by predominantly Republican politicians. So I think the inverse kind of makes sense of if you're one of those outlets that's kind of been spared that level of partisanship attack, maybe you're more trusted or you've certainly been, it's been indicated that you're not untrustworthy. This leads us to my next question, which is kind of the biggest question here.
Why is there such little trust in the media, particularly amongst Republicans? And so, you know, one is just that people are taking partisan cues from politicians. But what else is going on?
Yeah, I mean, obviously, this is a big question, Galen, and I am not an expert in it either. But I think that there are a couple of factors that kind of are a feedback loop. And I think it's hard to identify which came first, the chicken or the egg. But I think
A, among the Republican Party, there is a kind of rising anti-elite sentiment and the idea that people on the coasts, people with college degrees, you know, are out of touch with everyday Americans and media outlets obviously, you know, tend to be headquartered in Washington, D.C., New York City. They tend to be run by college educated people, you know, making lots of money and
And kind of in the same way that institutions in general have become mistrusted by the Republican Party, the media is obviously a big part of that. And then I think the other major factor is, as you mentioned, the fact that
Republican Party politicians, you know, Donald Trump obviously being at the top of the list, have trashed the media for a while now. I actually think back to Newt Gingrich in the 2012 presidential race. He liked to talk about, you know, the media and Sarah Palin for that matter, you know,
You know, and it's kind of been a boogeyman, as Lindley said, on the right for a while. And we do know that voters take cues from the elites in their party. And when you have a Donald Trump who, you know, is seen as fighting for the little guy, you know, he when he sets himself in opposition to the media, that is going to take a toll.
Yeah. So I pulled up some polling from the Knight Foundation along with Gallup that has looked into this question more broadly about why folks don't trust the media. And, you know, it's many fold. People will say that there are news organizations that put profits over delivering good news, that increasingly journalists are driven by political bias or trying to push an agenda, which like,
Part of this makes me wonder, like, is it necessarily a bad thing to be skeptical of the news media, especially in such a partisan atomized environment? Like,
Should we look at the numbers here and say, this is a disaster. We need to fix this. I mean, maybe like from a perspective of like how to do good journalism. Yes. But like from the perspective of are people looking at good information and saying, I don't trust it. Or are people looking at largely partisan information and saying, I don't trust it. I mean, both. Yeah. Yeah.
You know, yeah, like obviously there are a lot of partisan news sources out there. And I think that there are both on the left and the right. And I think there are both reasons for the right and the left to to doubt what the other side says. And frankly, there should be good reasons for people on the left.
each side to doubt what their own side says, but also obviously mainstream objective media outlets are being dragged through the mud on this stuff too. And that is bad. And the whole, you know, kind of we're in this post-fact world is not a good development. And I think, you know, particularly for our democracy, obviously we've,
We've saw this around the discussion about the election fraud in the 2020 election, which didn't happen as we've covered on the podcast. And so I do think that that is bad for democracy specifically and for kind of prospects of America coming together and being able to trust each other and kind of function as a society as well. In terms of solutions,
It's tricky. I think one interesting thing, you know, that you mentioned, Galen, is, you know, we do know that people trust local news more than the national news. And obviously, local news has been completely hollowed out in recent decades. And, you know, that is, I think, a very concerning trend and I think is not, you know,
a small factor in the issues with our democracy and with trust in institutions that we're seeing. And so, you know, if there were some magical way to kind of restore local news, you know, that would maybe, you know, speaking to what I had said before about, you know, the reason people or Republicans might distrust the news is that they're seen as, you know, New York and Washington elites. And, you know, if you had a, you know, your newscaster in Kansas City or whatever, you wouldn't necessarily think that.
I don't think there's an easy way to dig ourselves out of this problem, but I do get the sense that local news has a big role to play in it. Any closing thoughts, Lonely? I think that was a great summation. I'm only slightly disheartened that we didn't solve the entire problem of trusted media in the last 30 minutes, but maybe if we had 15 more, we could.
Well, I, you know, to that point, I see that YouGov is not on here. I know that YouGov is not maybe. Do you consider yourselves a news organization? Yes, right? Polling organization. Yeah. A polling organization. Do you know anything about the trust in YouGov?
We didn't have any polling organizations on here. I feel like I'd get even more criticism that people don't know the difference between polling organizations. Yeah, do you trust Gallup? Or do I trust who? We could do a poll of pollsters at APOR next year and try and answer that question.
Okay, we're all in on this? Yes. We're going to... Okay, which do you think... We do a little bit of this, obviously, at FiveThirtyEight, although I don't think that there is any broad awareness of the FiveThirtyEight pollster ratings. Do you want to submit FiveThirtyEight for next year's list? We're not a polling organization, Lindley. No, for the news one. For the news one. Well, you did. You put in ABC, and we ranked really highly, so we're proud. Mm-hmm.
A poll pollsters about polling organizations. Wow. That'll rake in the listeners, Galen. Click, click, click, click, click, click. So many clicks on that one.
All right. I'm looking forward to it. We'll see you in Atlanta. Lindley, thank you so much for joining today. Thank you guys so much. We really appreciate it. And thank you for answering our hard-hitting questions about your poll. I guess it was a good one to start with to have you actually on because we said it was a good use of polling. You could have said it was a bad use of polling if you wanted to. I wouldn't be offended. No. All criticism is good. Do a bad poll and then we can do it.
All right. I'll keep that in mind. Well, Lindley has listened to us long enough, I believe, from what she said about listening to us while writing that she's probably heard us say bad use of polling before. Not you, Gov. You, Gov. I have. And Lindley, we're very sorry. We're going to start creating stickers that say good use of polling, bad use of polling, and we'll send you a good use of polling sticker for this poll. Yeah, we should hand out awards. I love that. Yeah. Okay. Thank you guys so much. This was a blast. Thanks so much. Take care. All right, Nathaniel, stick around and we are going to talk about scandals.
You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad. Reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lipson Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a reproduced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Lipson Ads. Go to LipsonAds.com now. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N-Ads.com.
You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad. Reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lipson Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a reproduced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Lipson Ads. Go to LipsonAds.com now. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N-Ads.com.
Nathaniel, you are our resident scandal expert, so let's talk about last week's developments for Trump and Santos. On Tuesday, a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming former magazine writer E. Jean Carroll, as I mentioned at the top. It did not find him liable for rape.
So...
I think what we're going to try to do here is talk about how the public and maybe Republicans in particular are viewing the scandals that George Santos has faced and the scandals that former President Trump has faced either similarly or differently. But first of all, probably, you know, the higher profile deal is for Trump. So how does the public view him in regards to the Carroll case? And is it any different from, you know, the other scandals that we've talked about relating to him?
Yeah, so it's a little tricky because the only poll specific to this that I found was from YouGov, thanks, Lindley, and Yahoo News. But it was conducted just before the verdict came out, but it actually focused on the rape allegations, which, of course, as you noted, the jury did not find evidence that he had raped her, just the sexual assault component. And so I'm not sure exactly how much
value this is, but I will go through the poll anyway. First of all, YouGov and Yahoo asked if they thought that Carol's allegation of rape was true or false. Americans were divided, and a lot of them weren't sure. So 37% thought it was true, 33% thought it was false, and 29% weren't sure. Then they asked whether they thought that if
The jury determines that Trump did rape Carroll if he should be allowed to serve as president again in the future. And interestingly, 61% of Americans said no, that he should be barred from or that that would be disqualifying, basically. And that's significantly higher than YouGov, Yahoo and other pollsters, for that matter, have found.
With regarding some of these other investigations and scandals that Trump has been in. So, for example, 49% thought that his like interference in the 2020 election results should be disqualifying 50% found guilty. Right. Exactly. And 50% thought so about the, the stormy Daniels, uh,
hush money indictment. So, you know, a rape allegation does seem to be more seen as more of a big deal. And for other political science studies, for example, have also backed this up that kind of sexual assault is a particularly serious scandal and kind of the hierarchy of scandals. But of course, again, he was not found to have raped her. And so it's hard to know whether just kind of sexual assaults
broadly is kind of seen as disqualifying. I mean, frankly, my instinct is that, you know, even in the event that he had been found or that the jury had found that he had raped Carol, I don't think that he would lose the 2024 election 61% to 39%. So, you know, obviously there are, you know, and we've covered this right, there are Republicans who think that he has committed crimes that are
you know, still say that they are going to support him in future elections for, you know, reasons of, you know, just, yeah, he may be a flawed guy, but, you know, he's fighting for me. He has the policies that I want. You know, Joe Biden is unacceptable to me, et cetera. So the blogger website Just Security put out an article that aggregated some of the political science research on this stuff. And it's one of the points that it made was it was trying to make the point that the public will care about this.
And one of the points that it made was that plenty of the accusations that came out against Trump in 2016 were made during the general election, and that in that environment, Republican voters were choosing between Hillary Clinton and Trump. Whereas this time around, at least during the primary, Republican voters are going to be choosing between Trump and a whole host of other possible candidates, which I guess brings up the question more
I think it's
more of the kind of thing, but I still think that Trump has a lot of, you know, the Republican, other Republican candidates are still going to tread very lightly around this because, you know, Trump has a lot of fans still in the party and he
you know, nobody really wants to be singled out as the subject of his ire. But Asa Hutchinson, who then how do you even wage like a primary campaign? Yeah, it's a great question. What's even the point? Well, we had a podcast about this, right? You know, after the indictment, it's exactly right. Like if you Donald Trump is, you know, leading in the polls by what, like 30 points at this point. And like,
if you are intending to beat him, he has to come down in the polls. You have to attack him. And so I think I tweeted the other day, like, it does seem like a lot of people are actually running in the 2028 Republican primary where, you know, they understand that, you know, Donald Trump is going to win this one and they want to be well positioned for next time, or maybe they want to be his vice presidential pick. Um, I saw some of that speculation about Vivek Ramaswamy. Um,
Um, if you're Ron DeSantis, for example, who, you know, is kind of, he's been playing coy about the whole, his entire, the existence of his entire campaign and ambition. Um, but you know, if he, he seems to be the one person who, um, genuinely, I mean, I guess they probably all think that they can beat him to some degree, but like, he's obviously the one who has the best shot at that. And it'll be interesting to see how he handles this stuff. Yeah. Yeah.
You're going to talk about Asa Hutchinson, though, who is running for president and has actually criticized Trump on this stuff. Right. So Asa Hutchinson probably went the farthest of any candidate after the indictment of criticizing him. It was still, I think, a fairly kind of light tap on the Gene Carroll thing. He went more, I think, a direct criticism of Trump. But other candidates have been quiet. So Nikki Haley wouldn't talk about it. Mike Pence, who is not a candidate yet.
He kind of avoided the question. I also saw Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, who obviously are not running for president, but are both kind of major Republican elites. They also both avoided the question when they were asked. And so it's been a bit equivocal.
You have seen, for example, if Gramoswamy explicitly defend Trump in this case, you've seen a couple of kind of random senators, certainly kind of Trump's main critics like Mitt Romney took the occasion to criticize him again. You also saw, interestingly, Todd Young of Indiana say that he was basically done with Trump. And that was interesting. Of course, he has the distinction of having just one reelection in 2022, and he doesn't have to face voters again until 2028.
So, you know, I think the Senate in general, senators tend to be obviously insulated more because they have those six year terms. And I did see some other senators who, you know, said, you know, disapproving, shall we say, things about Trump, you know, in the wake of this verdict. But yeah, you know, certainly, you know, I think this is not going to precipitate a, you know, mass abandonment of Trump, you know, add it to the list, right?
On the other hand, there has been, I don't know if you would call it a mass abandonment, but a significant abandonment of George Santos, both by Republican lawmakers and by Republican voters. In some ways, I'm hesitant to even try to like draw a comparison between Trump and George Santos. Like they just play massively different roles in the public psyche, in the Republican Party, in actual politics and whatever. But like,
I think there are some folks who approach this era as, you know, it's the LOL, nothing matters, like scandals don't matter anymore era. It seems like as much as George Santos would like to try to embrace that ethos, it is not actually working out for him that way. So what does the public have to say and what have Republican lawmakers said since the indictment and, you know, even running up to it?
Right, exactly. Obviously, Trump and Santos, those cases could not be more different. You know, Republican elites and voters are very anti-Santos. And I think that is not a coincidence, right? Those two things aren't unrelated. So, you know, even before his indictment, a lot of his fellow Republicans from New York, for example, had called for his resignation and even his expulsion from the House.
A few new names got added to that list after his indictment, including Nicole Malliotakis and I believe Tony Gonzalez from Texas were two names that I saw. Kevin McCarthy also said that he wouldn't support him for reelection, which I don't know if that's going out on a huge limb. However, notably, in comparison to some of these other lawmakers that you're mentioning, Kevin McCarthy has not called on George Santos to resign.
So he may, I guess, be thinking about the next election. Obviously, Kevin McCarthy there has specific motivations, which is that he believes that as long as he gives his support to George Santos, he'll have at least one more vote in his pocket and he needs every vote he can get. But in any case, go on.
Yeah. And then from a public opinion perspective, you know, this is fairly old, but there was a Suffolk University poll within Santos's district, the third district of New York, back in January, and 78% of voters in the district said that Santos should resign, including 71% of Republicans.
Republicans are not standing by him. And obviously, you know, like Donald Trump is a singular figure in the Republican Party. He was president. He engendered a lot of loyalty. He's seen as a fighter. And George Santos was not known for anything before these scandals. And so there's obviously a lot less reason for both Republican voters and elites to have any allegiance to keeping him around.
Yeah. And as we saw, there's certainly a tipping point, right? Like Madison Cawthorn, even with a, you know, a Trump endorsement and everything else, like couldn't weather the pressure when the scandals started to mount in 2022. You know, what is likely to happen in this case? Because, of course, George Santos has been now indicted and has said he's going to continue to serve in Congress while this plays out.
But how is it going to play out? Right. So a lot of people, they were amazed at like, wow, George Santos still says he won't resign after this.
And like, I can't believe he's going to stick around. And I think that, you know, that's a little hasty. I think this is kind of part of the dance that we go through. Like, you know, politicians say they're not going to resign right up until the minute that they resign. And in fact, history strongly suggests that George Santos will not be long for this Congress. So I went back and looked at the last nine members of Congress to be indicted. Four of them resigned.
Three of them lost reelection and one of them retired. Only one of them survived their scandal, and that was Senator Bob Menendez, who was actually acquitted and he is still in the Senate today.
So just going by that, not good odds for Santos. In particular, I think some of these more recent cases could be instructive. So Chris Collins and Duncan Hunter are two representatives who resigned, gosh, I guess it was like five years ago now. It was during the Trump administration. They both pleaded guilty and resigned at like
right about at the same time. And I think, you know, kind of reading between the lines there, like it seems likely that they reached some sort of plea deal that included their resignation. And I think that's probably fairly common, like holding on, like that's a that's kind of a big
thing like to you know that's like one of the few cards that santos has left to play right so like saying now like you know i'm not going to resign i'm going to stick through it like that's all in well and good but like you know why would you resign now when you could kind of trade that in for a kind of more favorable treatment uh legally down the line um so i would not be surprised at all if in
a year or something when this case gets resolved, Santos pleads guilty and agrees to resign in exchange for, you know, a kind of a lighter treatment. All right. Well, we will see what happens. But let's move on for now and talk about Election Day. Yay.
You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad. Reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lipson Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a reproduced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Lipson Ads. Go to LipsonAds.com now. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N-Ads.com.
As I mentioned at the top, Tuesday is election day in Kentucky, Jacksonville, and Philadelphia. Now, there's a competitive Republican primary in the gubernatorial race in Kentucky, a general election for the Jacksonville mayoral race, as I said, also a major city with still a Republican mayor, and there's a primary for the Philadelphia mayoral race where the current cleavages and challenges of urban politics are coming to the fore. So,
Kentucky is the one statewide race that we're looking at. And of course, we're mostly focused on the primary because Democrat Andy Beshear is the incumbent governor there. He's quite popular. However, this race is happening with an incumbent Democrat in the White House. There may be some backlash against the Democratic Party overall in national politics. Who knows? A lot of Republicans are hoping that there is and that they'll be able to beat Andy Beshear in the general nonetheless. And so it's drawn out a lot of competition in the Republican primary.
What does the field look like? Yeah. So the front runner is attorney general, state attorney general, Daniel Cameron. Um, he is a basically like a Mitch McConnell protege. He used to be, uh, McConnell's general counsel. He's also endorsed by Trump. Um, and he's kind of been seen as a rising star within the Kentucky GOP for a while. He started off with a, you know, a kind of a strong lead in the polls. Um, and obviously he had that Trump endorsement, which, which is a pretty big deal. Um,
But there are several other candidates in the race, and I think kind of the most impactful has been Kelly Craft, who is Trump's former ambassador to the UN. He actually she took over after Nikki Haley.
And so she is a major Republican donor. She and her husband have millions of dollars and they have not been shy about spending it in this race. So Kraft has self-funded, I think, over nine million dollars over the course of the race. And she's been airing a lot of, you know, kind of red meat culture war ads.
and her affiliated SuperPAC has also been attacking Cameron. And so that seemed to make the race a bit closer. There was an Emerson poll back in April that showed Cameron at 30% and Kraft at 24%. But since then, it seems like Kraft has kind of stalled a bit. So her SuperPAC stopped airing ads in April. Cameron's SuperPAC really started to turn on the jets. They've been hitting back at Kraft.
And the most recent poll shows that Cameron is at 35% now, Kraft is at 18%, and State Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles is at 15%. He's kind of tried to play the nice guy. He's playing up his rural roots, really trying to get out the vote in rural Kentucky, saying that the state needs a governor who understands farmers. He's only aired positive ads, whereas Cameron and Kraft...
have really been attacking each other. So he's kind of trying to rise above it all, but he just doesn't have the resources that those other guys have. Obviously, Kraft being a self-funder, Cameron having a pretty deep-pocketed super pack as well.
So I mentioned that whoever wins this primary is going to be going up against Democratic incumbent Governor Andy Beshear. Folks may remember we talked about governor and senator rankings by Morning Consult, according to the nationwide polling that they did. According to that poll, Andy Beshear is the fifth most popular governor in the country.
And, you know, notably, 63% of Kentuckians approve of the job that he's doing and 32% disapprove. Now, of course, that polling is taken not during a general election. I imagine that those numbers will change somewhat once one of these candidates actually wins. But, you know, we don't have a model for this. And I know you love when I do this, but like, where would you place this race? Is it better than 50-50 for Andy Beshear given that approval rating, do you think?
No, I think, you know, I would call it a toss up. I w I wouldn't necessarily say that either party is favored. You obviously have this tension between Kentucky being a very red state and Bashir being a very popular governor. Um, you know, and he, you know, obviously he is popular for a reason. He, you know, has kind of stayed moderate throughout his, his career. He's also, his dad was also governor Steve. Um, he gave the state of the union response, uh,
you know, in like a pub or something. People might remember the one where you had like an old guy sitting in a pub talking to a camera awkwardly. That was him. Steve, not Andy.
Yeah. So so most kind of, you know, kind of political handicappers have this race as a toss up. I think that, yeah, you know, I think it's going to be one of it's probably going to be the most competitive single race this fall. So you also have gubernatorial races in Louisiana and Mississippi. But those are more likely to go for Republicans. Democrats, you know, think they have a decent candidate in Mississippi and Brandon Presley, who is distantly related to Elvis.
But it's still a Republican state with an incumbent Republican governor. And then Louisiana has a Democratic governor currently, John Bel Edwards, but he's term limited. So it's probably presumably going to revert to kind of the Republican norm that you would expect.
All right, let's keep rolling. We're going to move down to Jacksonville, Florida, where there is a general election in the mayoral race there. The incumbent is a Republican. Nathaniel, when we were talking about this, I did not realize how populous of a city Jacksonville, Florida was because it's the most populous city that has a Republican mayor. It turns out that geographically, Jacksonville is also what the second largest city
in America, which is part of the reason it's the most populous. It just includes like every single suburb. It's like larger even than Houston, for example. Right. So geographically, it is apparently technically the second physically largest city in the continental United States after some place in Kansas that is not a real city. So I think Jacksonville is actually geographically the first biggest city.
So, um, but yes, it's huge. It's, it's, it's basically, um, the, the city of Jacksonville, uh, is politically consolidated with Duval County, Florida. So as you mentioned, it's, it's, it's basically the entire county is going to be voting. It is a geographically, well, I guess by county standards, it's, it's maybe not that big, but, um, you know, it's, it's got a good chunk of land. It has a lot of people, um, you know, while obviously cities like, you know, Miami and Tampa and Orlando are kind of maybe more, um,
nationally known because those cities have a bunch of suburbs and that's where a lot of the people live whereas the suburbs of Jacksonville are just part of Jacksonville all those people are going to get to vote for mayor today to be clear
When you said this, I was like, what in the world? Like, it's largely Miami. Because also, of course, Miami has a Republican mayor. And so I looked it up. Of course, the metro area of Miami is over 6 million people. And the metro area of Jacksonville is about a million people. Right. Because that's the census to find. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's like basically that whole South Florida chunk, including like Broward County going up to Palm Beach. Yeah. So...
This is an interesting race for Jacksonville, of course, but it's also an interesting race because it's a highly suburban part of a, I guess, questionable now but once purple state. And it's had relatively close mayoral races in the past. So what are we looking at for tonight or whenever you're listening to this? Yeah, so the two candidates here are Democrat Donna Deegan and Republican Daniel Davis. So lots of alliterations in Jacksonville.
Yeah, they're facing off in a race that has predominantly been about crime. No surprise there for anybody who's followed other mayoral elections in the last few years. But it is interesting, I think, as a bellwether of a couple of different things. As you mentioned, it is the largest city in the United States that still has a Republican mayor. That's Lenny Curry, who is term limited out.
And so, you know, but obviously the urban rural kind of realignment that we're seeing, you know, means that urban areas are becoming, you know, ever more solidly Democrat and Jacksonville, in part because of the kind of consolidation and the inclusion of all those suburban areas has been the largest holdout so far. And I think it would be notable if Democrats were able to flip it.
It would also be notable for Democrats in kind of the Florida context, as you mentioned. Joe Biden in 2020 became the first Democrat to carry Duval County where Jacksonville is since Jimmy Carter.
And I think that, you know, while obviously there's been a lot of, you know, rightful attention paid to, um, you know, the, how, how red the rest of Florida has gotten, particularly with Latino voters in places like Miami-Dade County and Osceola County. While that has obviously been the most important political trend in Florida over the last few years, um,
An interesting one has been the fact that Duval County and suburban areas kind of in a more in kind of a story that is a little more universal, right, that we've seen around the country, you know, are still getting bluer. And there could still be a path for Democrats, you know, in Florida to win areas that they hadn't won in the past, maybe pairing those with Democrats.
you know, kind of an improvement among Latino voters in the future to win the state. So, you know, obviously, this is just one election. We don't want to draw too many conclusions about it. But, you know, it will be interesting. I think it'll be an interesting data point to see whether Democrats can flip this mayoral seat on Tuesday.
Last race we're watching Tuesday night is the Democratic primary in Philadelphia. For all intents and purposes, this is probably the general election. We don't expect a Republican to win the Philadelphia mayoral race this fall. It's a super competitive race, and it's a race where we don't expect anyone to get a majority. So whoever has the biggest plurality there, I guess Tuesday night will be representing the whole of Philadelphia.
Unlike New York and other cities, they have not adopted ranked choice voting and they do not have a runoff. So, you know, get ready for some non-majoritarian representation in Philadelphia. Who are we looking at, Nathaniel? Yeah, no, I really want to emphasize that point about the fact they don't have a runoff and how close this race is. This is the most competitive Philadelphia mayor's race in quite some time. I think a lot of observers just, you know, are like, you know, we haven't seen anything like this in a long time. Yeah.
And, you know, because I've seen a turnout estimate, for example, of around 300,000 people. And because there are so many candidates and it's so close, it's conceivable you could see somebody win with 25% of the Democratic vote. So, you know, you could have 75,000 people deciding basically the mayor of the city of 1.6 million, which is kind of crazy when you think about it. Anyway...
Yeah, so I mentioned that it's a very close race and there are a lot of different candidates obviously in the running. So I would say that the three frontrunners at this point are Rebecca Reinhart, who's the former city controller,
Helen Jim, who's a former city council member, and former city council member Sherelle Parker. Probably for listeners, those names don't mean a whole lot, but do they graft onto the cleavages in urban politics that we've seen in other cities like, of course, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles? Yes. So Helen Jim is, well, I was going to say people may have heard of Helen Jim, but I think that's probably just my circles, being election nerds and everything.
Helen Jim is this is kind of the she's been called Phillies AOC for example that gives you a sense she is a progressive woman of color she's Asian American she would be the first Asian American mayor of Philadelphia she and actually all of the three people that I just mentioned would be the first female mayor of Philadelphia but she kind of represents the progressive grassroots she has a strong following both locally and nationally she's a bit of a celebrity in those circles
And and yeah, so she's kind of the furthest left candidate. Rebecca Reinhart is kind of the more I would say like technocratic, like wonky. She's you know, she's she's liberal, but kind of in a more when you think about kind of the way that Catherine Garcia. Yeah, exactly. When you think I think about the way that the urban liberal vote often splits, you often have like the older and the younger candidate and not by not in terms of the eight, the
candidates right but the voters right so you know Reinhardt is kind of the older liberal you know more elite liberal I guess let's say candidate and Jim is the more activist progressive liberal candidate liberal versus progressive basically
Yeah, right. I mean, all the candidates are, well, I shouldn't say all the candidates are liberal. So let's, for example, let's talk about Sherelle Parker, who's the third frontrunner. She is also liberal, but she, I guess I call her more of like a Joe Biden liberal, right? You know, which is, I wouldn't call like Joe Biden, like, you know, like wonky necessarily. He just kind of is. So.
Sorry, that didn't mean that to come out weirdly. But Sherelle Parker is a former city council member from Northwest Philadelphia, which is a kind of a powerful area politically. She's part of this coalition of politicians up there who have produced a lot of prominent politicians. Her organization is strong. She's also the only major black candidate in a city that is plurality black. So that could go down to her advantage as well.
And then finally, I will stop monologuing in a second, I promise, you have two self-funders, businessmen, including Alan Dahm, who's kind of the centrist in the race. And then you also have grocery store owner Jeff Brown. They're not doing quite as well in the polls, but they are still factors. Obviously, they have spent quite a lot of money. So Dahm has poured a
$10 million of his own money, and then Brown has self-funded $4 million. So you can't quite count them out either. I think it's more likely that they might kind of affect the race in other ways by, you know, kind of taking away support in certain kind of quarters and affecting the, you know, who gets to cross the 25% or whatever threshold.
That is where we're going to leave things for Tuesday's elections. We did get a couple of requests to talk about Turkey's election on Sunday, which is going to a runoff between the current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the opposition, Kamal Kılıçdaroğlu. Do we have anything to say about that? The Twitter election nerds quickly sort of pounced on the idea that
Part of the reason that no one got a majority is that, you know, six or 8% or something went to a far right candidate whose voters will presumably go to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as opposed to Kamal Khashoggi. Is that, you know, believable? Like, what do we know about runoff elections in foreign countries? And if we don't know anything, we can also say that.
Yeah, I mean, I'm going to refrain from doing punditry on Turkish elections, but I will say that the polls seem to be pretty good of the first round, you know, which showed no candidate getting majority. And those same polling averages do show. Let's see if I can get this right. Kilic Tirolu.
He had a very small lead over Erdogan in the runoff polls, in the runoff polling average from Politico Europe. Obviously, you know, there's still two weeks in the campaign and that could change. But yeah, but obviously, I think this is a tremendously important election. Erdogan has ruled the country for about 20 years now, and he has kind of taken an increasingly authoritarian bent to things and the opposition candidate has
Kilic Dirolu, sorry, sorry, Turkish people. It has, you know, has kind of, you know, promised to kind of, you know, be more pro-democracy. And I think a lot of Western countries are secretly or maybe not so secretly rooting for him. And so, you know, obviously it would be, I think, a massive, massive impact in Turkey and globally if he were to win on May 28th.
But Galen, I'm curious for your thoughts, you know, being a former resident of Istanbul yourself. Yeah, so I was living there in 2010 and 2011 during a time when...
The economy was booming. I think there was like 12% annual GDP growth. And Erdogan was very popular. Of course, I was going to Boğaziçi University, where he was not popular at all. It was a lot of secular liberals. Erdogan has injected Islamist politics into Turkish politics to a greater degree than had been previously viewed as acceptable in Turkey, which is...
There's a lot of Turkish history to get into here, but in part as a result of Ataturk and the secularization of the country and even the Latinization of the alphabet and all these different things, they view certain aspects of...
secular culture as like very important to the national identity. Well, of course, Erdogan has changed that to some extent. In some ways, the Americans would view as like the normal pluralistic thing to do, for example, allowing public servants to wear headscarves or allowing, you know, male public servants to have beards and so on. Like those things were just previously banned. Anyway, Erdogan has obviously lost a lot of his popularity since my days in Turkey as a result of a lot of things. Inflation, the massive, like devastating earthquakes.
And also just the fact that he's been in power for a very long time and the country has seen a lot of things go wrong. There's no longer 12% annual GDP growth. It no longer feels like there was a lot of talk about the resurgence of this Ottoman Empire vibe and we're really coming into our own and we're going to be the broker in the Middle East. And I think to some extent, Erdogan probably still sees him that way, but it's questionable the extent to which that has actually worked out.
And so what I think was when I was in Turkey, a relatively smaller elite group of people who did not like the direction that Erdogan was taking the country and has grown to a much larger group of people that includes people impacted by inflation, people impacted by the earthquake and people who may just well be
ready for a change. You know, like when we talk about American elections and the percentage of Americans who actually vote specifically on the issue of democracy, we don't find like super high numbers. I would be curious to see if there's that kind of polling in Turkey, because the way that this election is going to be
is framed in the West is as like a pro-democracy versus authoritarian bent politician. And I know for, you know, the secular elite, that's part of it, even though I think most Americans would have some small d democratic, you know,
criticisms of the way that the secular elite in Turkey view secularism, but I'm gonna also now stop monologuing and say I would be curious to fully understand the dynamics there and look at some more in-depth polling, which maybe we'll get over the next two weeks. I don't know. Yeah, it'll be interesting. All right. That's that. We talked about the Turkish election. Maybe we'll talk about it again. We'll see. We should probably bring on an actual expert instead of just somebody who studied abroad there for a year. Someone who can actually pronounce their names.
But yeah, if any of my previous professors are listening to this podcast and want to get in touch, please do. Anyway, Nathaniel, that is it for today's podcast. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you, Galen. A pleasure as always.
My name is Galen Druk. Tony Chow is in the control room and also on video editing. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.
So this is my go-to running podcast. You're going to have the opportunity to run to yourself now. It'll make your run so much faster. Like because it'll give you anxiety or because like you'll motivate yourself. Yes. I love that. I would run straight into the Hudson River if I listened to this podcast while I was running.
