Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Forget the frustration of picking commerce platforms when you switch your business to Shopify, the global commerce platform that supercharges your selling wherever you sell. With Shopify, you'll harness the same intuitive features, trusted apps, and powerful analytics used by the world's leading brands. Sign up today for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash tech, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash tech.
Have you looked yourself up on chat GPT? I don't want to. I don't want to. Wait, you haven't entered like who is Nate Silver? No, I don't want to do that. Should we do it right now? No, don't do that. Well, for the record, I asked chat GPT who I was and it made up a whole crock of shit. Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. I'm Nate Silver.
And this is a mailbag. There's no model to talk about. Yeah. Should we do it anyway just for the rush? No, I feel like that undermines the integrity of Model Talk. Because then when we actually relaunch Model Talk, when there's a new model out, it will feel not so new and exciting. We don't want to cheapen Model Talk. No.
So today we're going to answer some listener questions. We dug through the mailbag. We dug through email, questions from Twitter. Folks had a lot of questions. But before we get to those, we have something maybe even more exciting to talk about, which is our live show. Yes. It's in April at the Bell House. I'm glad you know all of the details. It's April 19th.
At the Bell House in New York City. It's going to show up every day in April until it's the right day. At 7.30. It's in Brooklyn for folks who are unfamiliar with the Bell House. And it's going to be really fun. One of the five best boroughs in New York. One of the five best boroughs. Where would you rank it? I think we have a long tradition of you trashing the places that we go for live shows. I already have enough people. Notably Washington, D.C. I already have enough people. I love Brooklyn for many things. I think it's the third best...
food borough you think it's the third is does it go queens manhattan brooklyn queens is clearly number one cleans manhattan then like brooklyn slash bronx tied oh wow you're really impugning staten island there
Have you ever been to a red sauce Italian restaurant in Staten Island? I've been to some good restaurants in Staten Island. No, I don't want to impugn Staten Island. I mean, I think it should be part of New Jersey, but that's a compliment. Okay, wait. Back on track. Our live show. So we're going to be there. I mean, I hope to see you there. Yeah. We're going to have some special guests, which I haven't really decided who they're going to be yet. So if listeners have any requests, we are open to requests.
There's going to be, we expect to have a full house where tickets are selling fast already. It'll be fun. We're going to do some trivia. New York City trivia? New York. Well, see, I was thinking today about, because I was putting together some of these questions, and there was a good use or bad use of polling that I wanted to include today, but then I was like, no, this might be good for the live show. Let's save it.
But it would be part of not necessarily New York trivia, but just like maybe the argument is because so many different parts of America gather in New York, we could do America trivia. I don't know. New York trivia, man. Or it's like almost 420 do like weed related trivia. I mean, we've definitely asked questions about weed before during a live show. I mean, it's almost not that fun anymore because the polling is so has moved so decidedly in one direction, except Oklahoma just
rejected legalization of recreational marijuana. Did they? Yeah, we had an election on Tuesday. I'm sure it's impossible to get weed in Oklahoma then. No, I'm sure it's not that hard at all. It's been legal on some level for a while. This was a pretty... Oh, recreational, not medicinal. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's pretty far up the barber pole if Oklahoma's almost past legal.
But to the point, I'm not really sure what the bell house's policy is. You know, New York has legal recreational marijuana. I'm sure that you're welcome to use gummies on the premises. I don't know if you can actually smoke. I would assume that you can't. I don't necessarily want our audience being stoned. I mean, they're pretty...
Wait, hold on. It's not like a music show. It's legal. Our audience can do it. And in fact, I'm pretty sure they'll be selling alcohol on premises. Hey man, let's get stoned and go to a live podcast. You can do as you wish. The only thing I ask is that you participate during the audience response parts of trivia. And if you're more inclined to do so enthusiastically high, then who am I to tell you not to show up high? So again, that is April 19th.
at the Bell House in Brooklyn at 7:30. And to get tickets, go to 538.com/liveshow. Again, that's 538.com/liveshow. We look forward to seeing you there. Let's get to our listener questions. Nate, I have categorized our questions into three groups. They are the debt ceiling, 2024 politics, or other.
Which would you... I'm going to give you the option. The first time ever, I'm giving you the option. Which would you like to begin with? So debt ceiling 2024 politics. But I have to get to all of them eventually? You have to get to all of them eventually. Sorry. Let's do 2024. First question is from our tried and true Virginia contrarian on Twitter, who asks, is Biden a favorite for reelection right now, assuming he runs? Conditional on... I mean, I think there's some small chance that he'd lose Democratic primary or...
drop out or, you know, or die. Are we supposed to say that? And then there's like some chance he'd lose a general election. No, I think conditional on winning the Democratic nomination, you know, 50-50-ish. I mean, the incumbent historically has an advantage, but let's keep in mind that number one, Biden's polling isn't so great. Number two, the Electoral College will probably still favor Republicans, whether that's going to be a bigger edge or a smaller edge. Number three, the 82 years old thing is, I think, a material factor. So I think it's
In the realm of 55% Biden, if he wins the nomination, and because I think there's an outside chance that he could eventually not be the nominee if he runs, I'd say he's not a favorite. I'd say it's 50% or lower conditionally.
If I were to tell you who the Republican nominee was, would you be able to get closer to an answer? So if I were to say it's Trump or if I were to say it's DeSantis, would the – and conditional on Biden being the nominee in November when the election actually takes place? I mean, I think –
That DeSantis in the end might do a point or two better than Trump. Certainly there is, well, we now want to get into debates about like, how do you measure extremism? I was going to say, Trump is more extreme, but it's only on some dimensions. Some dimensions he's less extreme, right? I think there is an electoral penalty for extremism. It seems like DeSantis does a little bit better than Trump in the head to head polls against Biden. Although even though he doesn't have as much name recognition, he seems to do a little better, which is interesting. There are exceptions.
But, you know, the other thing is Trump did lose to Biden last time. Not by a huge amount, but he did lose to Biden last time. I think a lot of voters have moved on from Trump. Or I don't know that actually. So, but yeah. I mean, we had this conversation right after the 2022 midterms about whether DeSantis or Trump was stronger amongst Republican primary voters. And I guess now we're moving on to the general election version of that debate. But it looks like since the time that we spoke yesterday,
And at that time, you were pretty adamant that it was at least tied and probably maybe even DeSantis had the edge. It seems like...
Some of that advantage has faded for DeSantis, like more reliably. I think it looks a little bit. The polls are favoring Trump. You know, we don't look at just one poll, but Morning Consult has been tracking this over time so we can see trend lines, regardless of whether or not you believe the specific margin. You know, their most recent tracking poll showed Donald Trump leading Ron DeSantis by 10%.
25 points with Trump getting 53%, so a majority of the actual vote in some hypothetical primary, and actually even Trump having better odds against Biden in a general than DeSantis. I mean, what should we... Obviously, this is all months slash years away. I think in terms of the primary, Trump is running currently, and DeSantis...
I mean, he is de facto preparing to run. It would be shocking if he didn't run, right? But like they seem to be about even and then Trump declares and then gets a boost, which is something you typically see. I should say we saw it for Nikki Haley, actually. Her support doubled in this morning consult polling after she announced. It doubled from three to six percent, but not much. And maybe Trump's like a little bit of an exception because he doesn't need publicity exactly, right? But, you know, I think when DeSantis declares and gets a lot of media buzz,
The default is you get a bump, right? So it's not quite a level playing field right now. But no, I think Trump's held up okay-ish. I still think that like if you look at the higher quality state polls, DeSantis tends to do a little bit better there, right? I still think he's not the universal name recognition that Trump has and the fact that he's running, you know, he is in the mid-30s or something against a former president is...
Pretty good, actually. But yeah, I'd say there's been a tick of a shift toward Trump. But to answer our friend, the Virginia contrarian, Biden is not the favorite for reelection in 2024. Well, let's remove the condition of like whether he runs or not, right? I mean, look, if I want to like spitball, I used to be terrified about like spitballing without like a model. But now I just kind of think people should be able to understand that like even subjective probability is a good tool to like
discuss assumptions, right? So I guess my assumptions are something like if you were dividing up, I'd give DeSantis a 25% chance of being president, Trump 20%, Biden 40%. Am I doing this right? And then somebody else a 15% chance? Other, yeah. 15% chance other? Sure. You know what that reminds me of?
That reminds me of the brokered convention option during the 2020 Democratic primary. 15 on other. Look at all the things you get for other, right? You get the case where Biden passes on the nomination. He's not declared or gets ill, right? And I think there – we talked about this on Monday, right? Like there are some candidates who might be stronger than Biden. Right now I think those candidates are prevented from running because they don't want to undermine Biden, right? But there is a tier that I think would be –
Equal to or better than Biden, who is not a fantastic candidate to begin with, although a pretty good one, but like not fantastic. Right. And then you get the outside chance to think it's the least impressive part of the other that some other Republican wins. Right. Tucker Carlson rushes to the nomination or something. Right. And you have you have the chance of winning.
a third party. How many? Worth a couple points? Okay. All right. Yeah. Part of that 15%. All right. Next question from Jason. I think this is maybe a follow-up to our conversation on Monday. And we have gotten this question before, which is, why does J.B. Pritzker get overlooked when talking about presidential candidates? He's the governor of Illinois. I don't think he's been picked in any of our drafts. And I don't think we really talked about him on the podcast today.
My answer would be
Usually, if you're going to be a nominee or you're going to run for the nomination, you create buzz about yourself through your own political consultants, people who work for you, telling people who work in the press, oh, he's considering, he's raised this much money. Part of the invisible primary process that you engage in is making sure that people like us are talking about you. And JB Pritzker hasn't done that.
There's some anti-Midwest bias, though. Oh, but as if we haven't talked enough about Grouch and Whitmer. Yeah. Although even Whitmer, I think, is more of an innate thing or like an online election nerd thing than what the New York, Boston, Washington people think, I think. I mean, I think people from the Midwest like it, including Pritzker, kind of seem as like a little provincial. They don't seem like...
national figures in the same way that East Coast or maybe West Coast politicians do. Oh my God, you're being so generous. I also think it's not that impressive. I mean, when people think about an electability candidate, being the governor of a super, super blue state like Illinois is also not that impressive.
And sort of like what wins would you point to? Right. With Gretchen Whitmer, you can say she won a purple state running away in the 2022 midterms. It never even really got close. It was never really a question. But what are you going to say? You could say the same thing about Warnock sort of impressively winning these nationalized statewide campaigns back to back to back. Like, what are we going to say about Pritzker in terms of why he would make a good Democratic nominee?
No, that's fair, right? Although you can make the same critique and I do of like Gavin Newsom, for example. Yeah. Okay. All right. I think we've answered Jason's questions. Okay. So Kobe asks, do we have any data on what would happen if Trump ran third party? The presumption is, of course, that he'd split the vote and Dems would win the electoral college easily. But how specifically would that manifest on the map and could it have down ballot consequences? Yeah.
I agree that that's, I think the conventional wisdom is right in this case, right? I mean, if you have like DeSantis, Trump and Biden, I mean, look, voters are smart and strategic and like will gravitate toward one side or another, right? But like, but yeah, I mean, that would be a catastrophe, I would think for Republicans. Biden would win probably some states that like Democrats hadn't won in a while.
Liz asks a follow up question, which is what's the over under on Trump losing the primary and supporting the GOP nominee? I don't even know how I go about like I mean, it's such a like unique situation that like I think if he loses the primary, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe he'll think DeSantis is kind of his disciple or something.
Obviously, it's to Trump's benefit to make Republican primary voters believe that if he doesn't win the nomination, he'll destroy Republicans' prospects of winning the presidency because then, you know, that will, in a way, create a sort of rally around the Trump flag. No, I mean, you look at in the runoffs in Georgia a couple years ago and like Trump kind of undermined the GOP's chances there at a peak. Right. And so, yeah, I mean, that's probably the better precedent. Yeah.
There is some more specific data that we can look at in terms of trying to assess what would happen if Trump actually ran as a third party candidate, which is sore loser was. And so...
I looked at this recent Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy article that said that 28 states totaling 290 electoral votes have sore loser laws. But I think there's a lot of questions about how many of those would actually apply in this case, how many of those would hold up in court and actually prevent Trump from getting on the ballot. And there's a lot of disagreement there.
I think the clearest states that would not allow him on the ballot are South Dakota and Texas, according to this article. But really, there are probably six states where it would be difficult for him. There's a big question about whether or not he would be able to get on the ballot, which is Alabama, Arkansas, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Obviously, if you're not running in those states, you're not winning. But
I guess then there's also a question of would Trump's third party candidacy be about winning or just be about revenge? I mean, what's the constitutionality of sore loser laws? I assume given such a high profile case, it goes to SCOTUS eventually. I mean, that would make our jobs interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't think courts tend to be very sympathetic in general to restrictions that are not specified in the Constitution that prevent someone from
from being eligible, right? There'll be these, in my view, like horribly unconstitutional laws, like in California, like, oh, you must disclose X, Y information or you're not allowed to be in the ballot. It's like, I don't think you can, you know, you can't just like... Right. During Trump's presidency, there was the argument of like, oh, you have to give us your tax returns in order to run for president. Yeah. Yeah. Another hypothetical question here, which gets at the differences between the two parties is,
If Republicans pull a 2020 Democratic primary play and all endorse DeSantis right before Super Tuesday to stop Trump, would this have the same effect it did for Biden? Or does this help feed into Trump slash Republicans anti-establishment persona? Yeah, I mean, I think Republicans are different than Democrats in that respect. And Democrats do tend to fall in line. The stereotype used to be the reverse. Yeah, I think it has to be. I don't think it could be quite that heavy handed, right? I mean, if you have like,
If the non-DeSantis vote or the non-Trump vote was like 60% of the electorate and Trump was getting 40%, right, I think most of the non-DeSantis people would join together, right? But I don't think you'd peel off many Trump supporters. So it really depends on what the rest of the field looks like.
at that point. This is beyond... We're moving beyond the top of the ticket here. Which federal-level race in 2024 has the best shot of a third-party victory, excluding Maine? I was going to really ask your brain to do a lot of work here. Think about who's even running in 2024. I don't even know who's running. I mean, you know, where do the third-party states, Maine, Alaska... Utah. Utah are the kind of top three, I think. What about...
Texas, Ted Cruz is up for reelection again. What if Democrats were to endorse an independent candidate in Texas? Texas is a state where the conservatives are conservative and the liberals are liberal.
An inelastic state, as we might call it? It's pretty. Although the Hispanic vote in Texas has been pretty elastic. So maybe I take that back. Okay. We'll come back to that question. We got two more questions before we move on to our next section, which is Brian asked, New Hampshire has been told they will be punished for holding a primary when it's not their turn. They have a state law that says they must go first. But what happens if they just ignore the law and go second like they're scheduled? Does anyone get arrested or fined or anything?
I mean, I don't think you could actually prevent us. You can do is like take its delegates away. But New Hampshire has so few delegates that like it doesn't really matter anyway. Right. The question is, like, can you punish candidates for campaigning there and or will candidates voluntarily decline to campaign there? And also, does the media treat it as an important contest or not? Right. Because in some sense, the whole reason I mean, New Hampshire is like a, you know, cute little wintry place.
Corner of the country state, right? That like doesn't have that many people. I like New Hampshire. There we had a lot of fun in New Hampshire right before COVID hit. Although Staten Island has much better food. True. But it's like there's an agreed upon...
you know, consensus that it matters. And therefore, it has effects on how the media and other voters look at the rest of the candidates, right? So like, do the candidates take New Hampshire seriously? If they do, the media will take it seriously. And it may have its sellout strip, but it wouldn't really matter that much. But Brian actually asked a different question, which is not how can the Democratic Party enact retribution against candidates or against New Hampshire? It's
New Hampshire has this law and its constitution saying that New Hampshire has to be the first primary state. So what they're saying, what Brian is asking is, would somebody like sue the secretary of state or whatever of New Hampshire? Or like who would actually be held accountable if the eventuality comes to pass that New Hampshire does not go first? Like who do you sue? Who do you try to get bring to court? I don't understand. I don't understand how it works up there.
Final question in this section. With the midterm polls not predicting how well the Democrats were going to do, we can get into that. Why should I believe polls now that are showing a negative approval rating for Biden? Is it possible these polls could also be under polling this? So that's a myth. We have our pollster rating update coming out soon. And according to that,
The polls actually had a slight Democratic bias in 2022. Ooh, wait. You're really preempting the big news that we're releasing tomorrow. Actually, this is coming out on Thursday. So, no, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think we're allowed to talk about it. Yeah. And I think we're going to talk more about it next week. Yeah. But you can tease it a little bit more. I mean, our good friend Nathaniel Rickage did the analysis this year, so he's been more in the weeds lately.
And it depends in part on how... Because there's so many different firms. Some of them are prolific firms, had a lot of Republican misses. So it's looking more at the consensus of many different pollsters. But yeah, I mean, in the most high profile races, Democrats tended to do pretty well, right? And so the less high profile races, they didn't do as well. They way underperformed in states like Florida, for example. And so it's really... I mean, the headline is really the polls were unbiased, but technically there was actually a slight...
slight democratic bias this year. There certainly wasn't a big Republican bias. That is just total, I don't know, men. I don't know, men. People don't care about accuracy very much. It makes me mad as a journalist. I mean, look, it's always possible that polls are off, right? But like, you know, I mean, I think also pollsters, because there was this perception of a democratic bias, you know, maybe they rejiggered their methods a little bit, right? So I don't know.
So to people who are wondering, should I trust Biden's approval rating? And to put some numbers to that, Biden is currently underwater by about eight points. I mean, I think I would say the answer is generally yes. But also, I've said this before.
when the polls are off, they're generally off by what, two to four points. And so even if you were to say that our averages were off by two to four points, I mean, that would be a lot better for Biden than where he is, but that wouldn't put him in a net positive area in terms of approval rating. The other thing I would say is that
Biden himself believes the polls because you have seen him make significant pivots in areas where he is most underwater in terms of approval. Areas like immigration, where he's 20 to 30 points underwater. He's considering, you know, reported this week, reenacting detainment for families who are seeking asylum at the border, which he had undone, his administration undid in 2021. And so he's tacking more towards the center, taking a, you know, a more hawkish approach
to the border. I think because his administration, he himself actually believed the polls. There was a D.C. thing. I don't understand D.C. stuff, right? But it was something where Biden vetoed local authority on a crime something, something. No, no, no. He declined to veto something that had passed the Republican Party.
that got majority support from Republicans in the House and was able to pass the Senate with a little bit of Democratic support. And he declined to veto this bill that did override criminal justice reform things going on in D.C. But what was your point? Yeah, but that's like another issue. I mean, crime is kind of classically a Democratic vulnerability, right? And so, yeah.
All right, let's move on and talk about, are we doing other or the debt ceiling? Let's do other. Okay, let's do other, yeah. And then we'll save debt ceiling for last. Although, does that mean that people aren't going to listen to the end of the podcast? Let's just do other. Let's see how long other takes. Okay, let's do other. Let's see what happens.
This episode is brought to you by Experian. Are you paying for subscriptions you don't use but can't find the time or energy to cancel them? Experian could cancel unwanted subscriptions for you, saving you an average of $270 per year and plenty of time. Download the Experian app. Results will vary. Not all subscriptions are eligible. Savings are not guaranteed. Paid membership with connected payment account required.
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.
All right, this is really going to be a roller coaster. We're going to talk about all different kinds of things. First question is like we're going to ease out of the electoral politics slowly. So this is still on electoral politics. Question is, in the past, Nate has called polling firms who stopped doing horse race polling, quote, totally lame and argued the issue polling isn't actually easier to poll.
basically saying that like if you don't trust your horse race polling then we shouldn't trust your issue polling either would polls be better if on election day the normal voting ballots also included questions that got pulled on as a benchmark well there are ballot initiatives right we should look at that i don't know we've never looked or maybe we have like how accurate is ballot initiative polling would be really interesting to look at and then how much does it vary based on like
How much money you spent on the ballot initiative? Are people well informed about it? How many words are in the text of it? Like, that would be interesting to check. Yeah. I like that. Fellow FiveThirtyEight colleagues, if you're listening to this podcast, let's follow up. But there are other occasionally other ways to verify polling against hard data. Right. We know how many people made campaign contributions, for example. Right. We know certain types of political activity. We know, like, how many people watch politics.
different media outlets, right? And so, yeah, maybe that reality check would be good. I mean, we can also look at revealed preference data to compare that to polling data. Yeah. We talked about this a lot during COVID when we looked at sort of like mobility. Oh, 50% say they'll still wear masks on the plane and you go on the plane and 2% are, or not nobody. Yeah.
Andrew asks, any new polls about what people think of machine learning and AI developments? I think mostly people are pretty skeptical of it, right? So I looked up the data because I knew that this question was coming. Can you guess what
What percentage of Americans say that artificial intelligence's impact on society is more harm than good, more good than harm, equal harm and equal good? 55% more harm than good, 20% more good than harm, and the rest in the other bucket?
Ooh, you're a little more pessimistic about AI than Americans on the whole. Oh, okay. So national adults in January of 2023. So this is amidst, you know, some of the newer revelations and so on. So according to this Monmouth poll, 41% of Americans say more harm than good. 9% say more good than harm.
Okay, that's still a fairly big skew then. And equal harm and good is 46%. Yeah. So actually, no one really thinks it's more good than harm. There are a lot of debates about AI safety. I mean, these chatbots probably don't pose a threat, but whatever the next iteration is, there's been a lot of rapid progress in areas people thought was going to be difficult for a long time, and you can talk to lots of
Knowledgeable people, eccentric people about fears of AI takeover, very negative AI scenarios, right? I kind of think that people kind of think, oh, well, it's progressing right now. You have open AI in other organizations. There's not much interest in regulation. I think at some point this will come on to the radar as a major politics issue.
You know, I think it's more likely than not there'll be a question asked about AI in the 2024 presidential debate. That's one benchmark to look at, for example. And I think you might like actually have, and I've been talking to people, so it's like not, for my book, there's a lot of content on AI. So I'm not, when I talk about AI, it's not spitballing as much as it might seem. I think you have the potential for like a super majority that's worried about AI. On the one hand, you have conservatives who think AI is,
to woke, right? On the other hand, you have liberals who think AI will lead to misinformation. You have people who are just afraid of computers in general. It seems kind of scary, right? You have some really smart nerds who are worried about AI safety. And so even among the tech folks, they may be more worried about AI. You have incumbent technology players where if you're
Google or Microsoft, you might actually want AI regulation because you want to deter competitors from gaining AI, right? You might have the military, which wants to, you know, Department of Defense, which wants to monopolize technology itself. So there are like a lot of constituents who might be pretty strongly for AI regulation. And if you have some like scary incident, like, I don't know, I don't know what it would be. Some nuclear power plant is knocked offline because of a chatbot or something, then like
You also, by the way, have issues about copyright infringement, where if they're just synthesizing all of the world's text as training data and then reproducing the output, then that might violate copyright law. I think the knives are going to be out for AI safety or for AI at some point. And people should kind of figure that into their mental models of the technology's potential in either direction. Yeah.
Okay, so that was a good overview of some of the tensions that currently exist and ones that we can expect in the future. When it comes to Americans broadly, so we answered one of the questions, but as you laid out, there are going to be areas where Americans are more concerned than other areas. So Monmouth also asked about specific AI applications.
Only two of the ones that they asked were overall viewed as more of a good idea than a bad idea. Those two were perform risky jobs like coal mining. That was 75% versus 21% who say it's a bad idea. I would be interested to know exactly how that worked. And then the other generally positive was facial recognition at public places.
54% say good idea, 41% say bad idea. Some of the ideas that were generally seen as bad were nuclear power plant safety operations, self-driven local delivery trucks, military drone decision making, and then worst polling was robotic nurses for bedridden patients. Hmm.
What do you think about those options? Are those like in terms of good or bad use of polling and applications of AI, do you think those are like reasonable things to be asking about? It's a bit of a grab bag. I mean, I'm not sure I would rank them in the same order as the public necessarily, right? Like I'm surprised people are down with like facial recognition, man. That's what the...
That is a good point. That's what the commies are doing in China, Galen. Right. That's a good point. Okay. Well, I'll leave, I'll let that be, but that's a good point. And there's also polling that somewhat contradicts that. So morning consult did its own polling on this question and asked an even larger number of applicants about an even larger number of applications or things that folks were concerned about. And actually, and they said, you know, are you very somewhat not at all concerned this range? And so, um,
75% of Americans said they were very or somewhat concerned about
about their personal data privacy when it comes to AI. And that was the highest ranking thing. So like, and in some ways it's the most bipartisan too because some of these end up being maybe a little partisan. So that a little bit contradicts the facial recognition thing. Although maybe people just view facial recognition as different because of how widely it's already used like on your phone or something like that. Yeah, but like, you know, but like there's a local example here where the New York Knicks Madison Square Garden will now...
And they disclose it, actually. They put new signs up. They use facial recognition technology. If you are an enemy of Madison Square Garden, if you were a company that's, for example, been involved in suing the Knicks or Madison Square Garden company, then you'll be asked to leave or put on a watch list. That, to me, seems pretty creepy, I think, right? I mean, I guess it's a private venue, but it gets a lot of public subsidies. There is obviously pressure in New York for them to rescind that policy.
but James Dolan is a stubborn man. Now it's like a sports podcast now all of a sudden. Yeah, so let's steer it away from sports before I lose my ability to actually corral the conversation and ask relevant questions. We'll move on to some other questions that we got asked because we got some good ones, but I found this interesting, which of final data point here, of the things that Morning Consult asked Americans if they were concerned about,
The one that got the least amount of concern. Could you guess what it was? The chatbots, at least? No. Interestingly enough, it's job loss in my industry. 49% of Americans said they were very or somewhat concerned about this.
That's still a fair bit. Which is a fair bit, but it's significantly less than the other things that were asked about. And my instinct is that it's because many people themselves feel like their job, what they do, is not replaceable by this technology. Because when you ask folks, oh, how likely do you think it is that newspaper articles are going to be written by AI, for example, a lot of people say that it's likely. They then say that they don't think it's a good idea. This is according to the Monmouth Polling.
But I think it's easier to look at other industries and say, yeah, that could definitely be automated. But harder to say that about yourself, your own industry. Yeah, I think like legal briefs and stuff like that could be automated or, you know. I have one friend who... Lawyers don't come for us. One friend who admitted to using ChatGPT for a letter of recommendation because they're so like boilerplate anyway. It's kind of what you're doing, basically. Have you looked yourself up on ChatGPT? I want to.
I don't want to. Wait, you haven't entered like who is Nate Silver? No, I don't want to do that. Should we do it right now? No, don't do that. Well, for the record, I asked ChatGPT who I was and it made up a whole crock of shit. That's funny. About my biography. It said that I worked for MTV. That's cool. Frankly, it came up with a biography that was probably more interesting than my actual biography. But okay, moving on.
This was an interesting question, and I don't really know why it was asked, but it is interesting, so we will talk about it. The question is, how many scientists are religious? Is there current data on that? Is there any kind of majority or plurality showing religiousness or none? If they are religious, what belief system do they tend to hold, if any? So I'm going to let you weigh in on this, but first I'll add some data here because I did try to look this up for the listener.
The only data I could find was very old. So I would assume that the trend that I'm going to reveal in this data has just been even further exacerbated. This is a Pew survey from 2009. So a survey of scientists who are members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science finds that members of this group are on the whole much less religious than the general public. Indeed, the survey shows that scientists are roughly half as likely as the general public to believe in God or a higher power.
According to the poll, just over half of scientists, 51%, believe in some form of deity or a higher power. Specifically, 33% of scientists say they believe in God, while 18% say they believe in a universal spirit or higher power. By contrast, 95% of Americans believe in some form of deity or higher power, according to a survey of the general public conducted by the Pew Research Center in July of 2006.
Yeah, and there's been a big shift toward irreligiosity since then. So I imagine that the general public majority of scientists don't believe in, although what a kind of higher power means or a greater force is a little bit ambiguous. I mean, you know, if you, there's something called the simulation hypothesis, which is that you may believe the world's a,
AI simulation of like chat GPT 86 or whatever, right? In which case, I don't know what that does to your theology exactly. Yeah. I mean, I think that this person is maybe trying to get at a larger point here, which is that experts' worldviews
are very different from the general public's. Yeah. I know that this is something that you have thought a lot about, stressed out a lot about over the past few years. And it's something that's come up again with the most recent updates on, you know, the lab leak theory in terms of the origin for COVID and things like that. But I mean, what does it mean for our society that our experts have very different worldview from the rest of us?
I think the most salient thing is that educational polarization, meaning that increasingly having a college degree, particularly an advanced degree, means that you're going to vote Democratic, right? That has a lot of effects on institutions that rely on a certain type of experts in those fields, right? I mean, in media, especially high prestige media, you know, there are just not very many Republicans, right? There are not very many Republican scientists. There are not very many Republican public health experts.
officials, which is particularly left-leaning discipline. And I think these institutions aren't used to the fact that there's now a smooshing together of partisanship and expertise. It does not mean that every expert is partisan, but it's much more pronounced than it was even 20 years ago or something. And I think the institutions have not
adjusted yet. I mean, you see, I think increasingly like, you know, there is more censoring of dissent in different institutions and in different ways, right? You know, with the lab leak theory, there were like pretty active efforts to label speculation about a lab leak as misinformation, to have scientists write letters and say, okay, that
you know, we as a community of scientists respect the integrity of the Chinese people. Right. And so like, so this is a big problem, I think. I mean, it really is like, and now also like, can we name the problem? Is it just that it creates more distrust in institutions and like a general greater fragmentation? I mean, what you're describing is a fragmentation of society, but what is, what are the symptoms of that kind of fragmentation? Like greater distrust?
Well, more f*** ups, more f*** ups, greater distrust, more people who are partisan actors taking advantage of those groups and putting political or social pressure on them. You know, also you have an issue where when Republicans are in charge and appointing like federal agencies, right, you may have a lack of expertise. That's an issue too, I think, right? But like, but I mean, this could be like a three hour long interview.
But like, no, I think that like it's not just perceptions when you have like people kind of, I mean, and increasingly, like I think the view is that like, oh, what kind of like the progressive worldview is on the right side of the big picture questions. So like, don't worry about, don't just ask questions. Don't worry about like the details that much. Right. And I think it leads to worse performance. And I could like cite, you know, various journalistic examples like censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story was a pretty bad one. Right. There's debate now about like,
How Fox News handled the Election Day call in Arizona, where Fox News should not have called Arizona. Their model said that the outstanding vote was going to Biden. It went overwhelmingly to Trump. The New York Times didn't take the call. The AP later said we f***ed up the call. Other networks never called Arizona. Like, this is not...
ambiguous, right? But now there's like a lot of relitigation about like Fox News on election day and overall the election denial stuff that Fox indulged was really terrible and for journalism and democracy and but like but the fact is that like that the Fox News decision desk like made a big mistake that could have been extremely consequential if Trump had gotten 10,500 whatever it was more votes in Arizona and like
And people don't want to talk about that because it's like, well, these guys are on the wrong side of this question and we don't want to indulge in... Right. The problem being that things rarely turn out that way. When you're like...
there are bigger there are bigger issues at stake so let's not talk about that now like for example if that was your position about the lab leak theory is like this is ultimately by saying like let's not talk about this or entertain this right now because there are more important things or because it's not that likely it ends up making that question and that debate so much more political and so much more like relevant for the lab leak like a longer period like seven million people have died officially of covid the unofficial numbers are probably much higher in places like india um
You know, that's like a really consequential question. When one person dies, we have like a murder trial and it gets on court TV and we discuss it for months. And here seven million people have died. That seems like consequential. I mean, you know, I think that, you know, again, some of the closures of schools, for example, during COVID were certainly a very consequential policy. I mean, I think a good example of politics and expertise becoming entwined in this weird way is
is if you look at how experts in other countries handled this. So if you look at Scandinavian countries, for example, experts that weren't facing similar political pressures came to different conclusions about what to do. In Sweden, I mean, it's, you know, I mean, there are different strategies. I think in general, public health people tend to be pretty cautious, pretty risk averse, right? No, I mean, look, the canonical example was
Lots of like public health officials saying we endorse like the George Floyd protests after like months of telling people like to stay indoors for almost everything. Right. Which I think they're right. I think, by the way, that like political activity is important and worth the small chance of getting COVID for. It was just totally inconsistent with like everything they said before and kind of nakedly so. Right. And like, you know, and I think a lot of people said, OK, you know.
you pick this thing that you think is really important, but me visiting my like dying relative in the hospital or sending my child to school or seeing my friends in person, right. Are not allowed. That seems like, that seems like it's not a truly neutral decision. And you know, if people feel like, I mean, again, it's very hard to know. It's hard to know like how much people feel like they can't express themselves about different things. But like, I think this, I think this is a pretty big issue. I think anytime that like it becomes seen as a negative attribute to like
question experts and question institutions like that's a pretty illiberal value, I think, and like not a healthy value. Partisanship and expertise, when there's a mishmash of them, I think that has like various negative downstream effects.
We could talk about this forever, but we're not going to today. On this topic, though, speaking of sort of like curiosity and in particular journalistic curiosity, Christopher asks, if you could create a poll, what would you want to ask? It could be serious, professional, fun, or just curious. What would you ask Americans? I mean, actually, maybe like doing more polls of experts would be good, right? Because people like often make assertions about the scientific consensus, right?
Like, you know, there are some economists, I have some friends at University of Chicago who like do like polls of economists, but how do you feel about this like big important economic question? I think tools to let journalists know kind of what the scientific consensus is, where there is a consensus and where there isn't would be pretty valuable. I think they might be better if they're like
Does the University of Chicago one like gives you their names, right? But like, you know, or maybe anonymize half of it and say, are there issues on which if given anonymity, you know, like how many scientists of different domains actually believe in the lab leak, right? There are different claims about that, right? And that's like an empirically kind of testable question.
Interesting. I think I've seen you compare this to climate change. Like the reason that we know that there's a consensus among scientists on climate change is because this work has been done. But we don't know where there are consensuses. Consenses? Consensuses? No, and climate's an issue where like the response has been, I wrote a chapter about this in my previous book, right? Where like the IPCC is very precise about like
Telling you on which questions area consent. There's a consensus in which there isn't right a lot of best practices develop there and like it seems like getting away from that a little bit more I don't know. I have an answer to this question. You're here. Yeah, I would be more curious from the broad public how they answer questions like what should the point of politics be what constitutes a good life and
you know, how should we judge the success of America? Like, I think our politics, which is kind of like what I hate about covering politics, is that it's all gotten so entrenched, sort of like these 20 issues that
politics gets waged over again and again and again. And it sort of loses sight of like, should we judge America based or our politics based on, you know, how happy people are, how healthy people are, how wealthy people are? And then should we do it based on an average or looking at, you know, should we judge America based on who's worst off among us and how are they faring? We've just gotten into this like weird routine of always arguing about the same that I think for a
abstract. I'll give you an example of this. So conversations about health in America always hinge on sort of health insurance and the cost of care. I have only I've been watching political debates for far too long at this point. I have only ever heard two people on a debate stage talk about health, which is actually the more important question, like how healthy are Americans?
It was Marianne Williamson and Mike Huckabee on the second tier debate stage during the primaries who actually said, okay, let's talk about why Americans are so sick. Let's talk about the other aspects that go into health beyond the point at which you're receiving your insulin shot or whatever it may be. Weirdly, I think it would be more attractive to people if it focused on the things that felt like...
You know, mental health, happiness. Are you saying a Marianne Williamson, Mike Huckabee unity ticket could sweep the nation in 2024? That's exactly what I'm saying. Like, you know, people are worried about the mental health crisis. Like, why aren't Americans happy? Why are Americans so depressed? Like, you don't really hear...
the things that are so immediate to people sometimes be the most debated or get the most attention. And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that perception is wrong. And maybe that's why we should pull people. Like, how should we judge our success as a country? Yeah. Okay. So we're going to give listeners maybe and Nate what they want and only ask one debt ceiling question, which is, do we know when exactly we will default on our debt?
We, in the collective sense, do, but I don't. I don't know how the dates memorize. We don't know. We still don't know, right? Well, there's desire to be ambiguous, right? I mean, no one is quite sure how many different tricks they can play. To some extent, you probably want to diffuse brinksmanship a little bit. So you want to not say things. And there's probably questions like, when does...
When does Jeff Bezos pay his tax bill, right? Does he file for an extension? Things like that are very likely. Oh, no, it literally does. No, no, I looked into this a little bit. It literally does depend on how tax season goes and how much money the U.S. gets.
Or has to pay out on April 16th. I'm filing an extension this year, guys. So one second or something of one second less. So I got some competing answers. Goldman Sachs expects the so-called X date to arrive in early to mid-August.
Another answer I got was that it could happen anytime between July and September. And that's according to the Congressional Budget Office. The other thing that's important is tax season matters. Also, you can make decisions about what things you pay. And so if you prioritize paying interest payments, for example, on the U.S.'s debt, then you can extend the amount of time before we default. But then you won't be paying for other government services. So basically, it's super complicated and we don't know.
Who needs it? Who needs those other services? All right. Nate, that's a wrap. Thank you, Galen. Thank you. My name is Galen Druk. Tony Chow is in the control room. 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.
