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Pickleball looks ridiculous. It sounds ridiculous. The problem is it's really fun. So I got into pickleball. Oh, no. The New York Times trend story was ridiculous. It was basically like people doing things sometimes get hurt. That was essentially the story. But it was making a big deal about pickleball doing things. I went on many rants with friends about this. This weekend, played pickleball.
sprained my wrist. Oh no. Sprained your what? My wrist. It's fine. Oh no. But I felt it was that extra shame of being on a high horse about something and then having it all, you know, you, you fell off the horse and you sprained your wrist. It wasn't good.
Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. After plenty of back and forth within the Democratic Party, last Wednesday, President Biden announced a plan to use executive action to forgive student loan debt. It
It forgives $10,000 of debt for borrowers making under $125,000 a year or couples making under $250,000. And the amount of debt forgiveness goes up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients, the majority of whom come from families making less than $30,000 a year. The plan also caps monthly payments on loans at 5% of the borrower's discretionary income, down from 10%.
Student loan forgiveness has become a priority for the left flank of the Democratic Party in recent years, but many wanted Biden to go further. So what does Biden's plan tell us about the state of Democratic politics and what effect is it likely to have both practically and politically?
We'll also discuss a recent analysis of voter registration data that suggests the number of women registering to vote surged in some states after the Dobbs decision in June. We'll change up our favorite question a little bit and ask if this is a good or bad use of data. Finally, we'll look at Joe Biden's approval rating, which has ticked up nearly five points since its all-time low of 37.5% in July. To what does he owe that rebound?
Here with me to discuss it all is Editor-in-Chief Nate Silver. Hey, Nate. How's it going? Hey, guys. Also here with us is senior politics writer Amelia Thompson-DeVoe. Hey, Amelia. Hey, Galen. And also here with us is Deputy Editor Chadwick Matlin. Hello, Chadwick. How are you? Hi, Galen. Such a pleasure to be on this side of the podcast. I don't know if I've ever been the panelist before.
I know listeners may recognize your voice because you have filled in in the host chair in the past and folks have almost certainly heard your name in the credits of this podcast. You, Chad, have also done reporting on student debt. So we are very glad to have your expertise on that today. And that's how we're going to kick the show off. So let's dive in.
The debate within the Democratic Party that got Biden to this point on student debt forgiveness was a long, if not necessarily closely watched one. A majority of Americans say in polls that they haven't been following the issue closely. Some on the left wanted more, up to $50,000 in debt relief, and in some cases even more than that.
On the other side of the debate, some swing state Democratic candidates up for election this fall have said that the announced plan goes too far. Meanwhile, Republicans have been uniformly opposed, suggesting it's unfair to most taxpayers who don't have loans, particularly those who never went to college. Only 14% of Americans have federal student loans, and two-thirds of Americans don't have college degrees.
So we're going to get into a lot of the nuances of this policy and the politics around it. But first and foremost, since we love public opinion, is this debt forgiveness plan popular, Chad? I got a poll. So Emerson College released a poll on Friday. 1,000 people voted.
And a third, only a third of voters say it's too much action. This is the $10,000 forgiveness in particular, whereas this is sort of a Goldilocks poll, too much, too little, just right. And 35% said it was just right, and 30% said it's not enough. So if you combine all that, two-thirds of those polled say that this is at least a step forward.
in the right direction, if you will, right? And there was no meaningful change based on college degree, which I found interesting. There was meaningful change based on age, which we can talk about, but the actual attainment of degree didn't matter. And I think that's important because a lot of the pain from student debt comes from those who
started college and did not finish it. And so are left with debt from without the benefit, if you will, of the degree, which is why they went into debt in the first place. And so that didn't actually shape the answer to the poll question.
Yeah, it's interesting. I saw a CNBC poll out last week as well that showed there was actually more support for the loan forgiveness plan amongst people who didn't have a college degree than amongst people who did have a college degree. It was slight, but it was noticeable. So
Nate and Amelia, looking at that poll that's kind of like a third, a third, a third, sometimes we criticize those types of polls because it ends up oftentimes with a distribution that looks something like that when you give people too much, too little, just right option. But do you think based on the data we have, we can say that this is actually a popular policy? I think the jury is out. Number one, I don't like these Goldilocks type of polls. I think there was a YouGov poll that had like 54%
approve 46% disapprove or something like that, right? It was a CBS YouGov poll. CBS YouGov, yeah. That's more straightforward to me. But also, I don't think this is necessarily something that Americans were thinking about a lot. I think there's dialogue occurring about this executive act that could affect public opinion a fair bit. If you look at Tim Ryan in Ohio, he's kind of not so excited about it. And so, look, I think the Biden administration looked at this
tallied up the pluses and minuses and concluded that the pluses outweighed. And I think they're probably right as a matter of politics. I don't expect it to be a slam dunk, however, as you see kind of by the behavior of candidates on the ground.
Yeah, well, I mean, Republicans are clearly trying to turn this into an economic wedge issue, right? I mean, we see my candidates out there immediately saying, you know, this is unfair. This is making people who didn't go to college pay for other people's degrees, that it's going to, you know, actually lead to higher tuition in the long run, that it's going to increase inflation. You know, this is something that immediately turned into a talking point on the right, right?
And not all moderate Democrats are happy with it. I mean, it does seem from the polling, though, that like they're not going into this with forgive it with this policy being unpopular. And that seems important. It's not like they're starting from a baseline of like people are sort of generally aware of this. If you call them in a poll and you ask them kind of, you know, off the top of their head, they're like, no, I don't like that idea.
Nate, you said that Biden probably looked at the political pros and cons of the actions that were at his disposal and settled on this. Obviously, we don't know what the behind the scenes conversations look like, but to the best we can probably estimate, what does it seem like those pros and cons were and how did Biden settle on this kind of action? I mean, to me, I don't know the backstory, right? To me,
One pro is that people who get debt relief are going to be really happy. If I get $10,000 or $20,000 knocked off the balance, it's been hard for me to pay off, then that might make me more inclined to
turn out to vote. And if I do vote Democratic, you know, I mean, we should say borrowers are a quite Democratic group to begin with, right? Being college educated is correlated with voting Democratic and especially kind of like middle income college educated younger people. It's probably a very two to one, if not more Democratic group. But still, you weigh that against on the one hand, you're going to have potentially some inflationary effect. I think a
Jason Furman, who's a centrist economist, estimates 0.2% added to inflation. So put that into your calculators, whatever marginal impact that has on people's bottom lines and then on their voting preferences. And you might have some people who are annoyed that college students got debt forgiveness when other groups did not. You could have spent, instead of $10,000 per debtor, you could have said, OK, let's just get like a
$200 to everybody below a certain income threshold. We didn't do that. We selected a certain very democratic leading group. Will the annoyance plus the inflation outweigh the benefit of this directly? I don't know. I think it's probably close. I think probably not, but depends on how bad the inflationary effect might be. MAX WIETHE: A couple notes on that, Nate. One is that this kind of program is different than a stimulus program where you're just giving people checks.
That is an influx in cash all at once into someone's bank account, whereas this is removing a burden, if you will, that someone is trying to budget for month to month, right? No one's getting $10,000 at once, obviously, or $20,000 if you got a Pell Grant.
And so as a result, what might be happening is people are getting, you know, whatever, a couple hundred bucks a month back that they otherwise were putting toward their loans. So that's pretty different than a one-time influx of stimulus payment. I'm not saying there won't be any inflationary pressure. I'm not an economist, but it does seem like a different mechanism. And what we learned during the
pandemic was that part of what drove up the inflation, and Amelia, you know this better than I, part of what drove up the inflation from the stimulus programs and the child tax credit was the all at once-ness of it as opposed to how distributed it was. There was something in Europe where the inflationary pressures were, the inflation rose less than it did here because those social services were already priced in, if you will, to people's budgets. Is that right, Amelia?
Yeah, I mean, it was the all at onceness and it was also that it was just kind of like a blanket check that wasn't targeted to people which had, you know, who really needed it, which had to happen for a lot of reasons having to do with the administration of our social safety net that we just weren't able to do that. But I think what the Biden administration would argue with this plan is that they are targeting it.
and it is going to go to people who, you know, are not making a lot of money, would not easily be able to pay off their loans. I will say that there has been some pushback against that. There has been argument that, you know, in addition to people who have a lot of debt and are making not so much money, that also this could help, you know, there's been like a lot of talk about graduate student debt and people who have MBAs and people who went to law school and people who went to medical school who, you know, have, you know,
big potential career earnings who could still benefit from that. And I mean, we can talk about the extent to which that's true. But I do think the one other thing I've seen on the inflation point that I think is important is that there's been one more pause on federal student loan payments, but then those are going to restart again in the new year. And so the other thing I've heard from people who are less convinced that this is going to have a big inflationary impact is that, yes, some people will no longer have the
pressure of the payment or they'll have a smaller payment, but other people will have to start budgeting for their student loan payments again. So it's a little hard to predict, I think, how all of this is going to play out. I got to critique that. I mean,
things are probably going to resume, the payments are probably going to resume no matter what. It creates an artificial baseline to say, here's this other change that was going to happen anyway that goes the opposite direction. If you had resumed payments and not had this-- this is a big bill. People estimate it at $500 or $600 billion potentially. That's a lot of money coming out people's books that they're now able to spend in other ways. LYNN WOLL: But it's over time.
That's the point Chad was making. And I think it's the same thing with the, I mean, it's the same idea with the paused payments resuming. Well, because the way that people think about this in their budgets is that they aren't getting $10,000 back all at once. They're thinking to themselves, oh, I have $200 a month that I can use differently. I think that's the way people think about it. I mean, people work. That's how loans work. Yeah. That's how people are getting the money. People who are expert economists-
think this is going to cause inflation, right? It's a lot of money. Some do. Some do, some don't. So I think, let's put this aside for a second, because I think this is ultimately something that is up for debate right now and will be determined only with time and more evidence. But I think there is a debate here over whether ultimately this plan that Biden came out with
is more about politics or policy. So the left had been pushing for up to $50,000 of student loan forgiveness. Meanwhile, previously, Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi had said the president can't use executive action to forgive student loans, suggesting that perhaps the more middle-of-the-road position was just, no, this is not something that is a priority for Democrats while they have control of the White House and the Senate and Congress.
the House. Why did Biden ultimately do this? Because again, we're talking about a very small percentage of the population, 14% of the population. We're talking about an issue that is not a high salience issue for voters at all. You know, we do polling with Ipsos all the time and student loans are not very, or don't even register. And when you ask Americans, how closely have you been following this debate? A majority say, no, not closely.
So why did Biden do this? Is it because ultimately it is really good policy or is it because basically this was the political sort of like triangulation that made the most sense in order to like keep the base happy, but like not go too far or whatever? I mean, it's not I'm as trained as an economist. Right. It's not particularly good policy. Right. I can imagine like much more.
Worse ways that taxpayer dollars are being spent. But it's pretty arbitrary whether you're taking out debt to go to school versus for some other purpose. Like a medical or credit card or whatever. Yeah, or a small business loan or something like that, right? Or a mortgage, right? Yeah.
So it clearly prioritizes a certain type of behavior. And we can talk about how well off these people right now, but generally speaking, people with college degrees have higher socioeconomic status. That means they're going to have better health and life outcomes in various ways. That means their earning potential over the course of their career is probably fairly high, even if they're not earning a lot right now. So it's something that he could do
via executive action, right? That's one big benefit. Maybe. I don't think this is going to survive the Supreme Court. I would not put money on this, making it through the Roberts Court. I agree. I agree. I agree. It's exactly the kind of thing that the court would
feel like striking down. I agree with that, which changed the politics, I think. So maybe that was part of the calculation. It's like, hey, I can do the thing that base wants, but it won't necessarily happen in the end anyway. I disagree with that take too, though. I think you say, oh, it's only 40% of people. 40% is not a trivial number. There are people who are directly helped by this policy a lot. And if you remove them from the table, they're not actually getting this discount.
then I'm not sure that helps Biden quite as much, right? Then you have the people who are scolding and annoyed by it. You don't have the inflationary effect, but you do have, but you remove the actual money people's pocketbooks. I think that becomes like pretty bad for the White House. Don't people, wait, wait, okay. Haven't, I feel like we've been through this many times on this podcast. Aren't people more liable to vote because they're angry or fearful or have something happen that they don't like than because they have something happen that they do like?
which would suggest that if you give something to people and then the Supreme Court takes it away and there's already this strain in the culture that's like the Supreme Court is too conservative, they're striking down all of the Democrats' priorities, then you have one more reason to be angry, which seems like, you know, ultimately, I think we have good data that shows that people are more liable to vote when they're angry than when they're happy. Well, Democrats are already maxing out on the
Anger motivation to vote scale, right? We can talk about that in the in the women Red string segment later But like they're not lacking for reasons to turn their base out that was the argument for this like six months ago before Biden had these various things passed before the Dobbs decision whatever else $10,000 is a pretty meaningful impact. This is not a trivial amount of money. It's a life-changing Some potentially for some people I would think that would have some effect that's fairly direct. I
I got to give this to Chad. Chad, you have done kind of more research than any of us here in terms of student loan forgiveness. What's your estimation here? Yeah. So the background to what Galen is saying is that I've done some reporting on my own journey of having a massive amount of debt right during college. I had $125,000 when I left college and sort of written about how I paid that off.
And in that process sort of encountered the sort of different gradations of burden that Americans feel with debt and why that is. And, you know, I think part of the trick is that Americans for several generations were sold –
a line about college as it being part of the American dream and being a part of socioeconomic mobility. And now many people are in debt because of that American dream, right? They used to be indebted to it. Now they're in debt because of it. And so how does that sort of mix with the broader culture? And I think one of the tricks here is that the actual fundamental reality of college in America and the cost of college in America has not changed because of this policy. There's no lasting change that's been made. The price of college has increased
After adjusting for inflation, the price of college has doubled in the last 50 years. That's after adjusting for inflation. And so the way that people go to college now is through debt. When I went to college 20 years ago, my loans were part of my financial aid package. We think of financial aid as grants in this sort of common parlance, but loans are now what financial aid is for many people.
And so as a result, providing a valve to release some pressure from people's lives is one thing when you are those people. But the actual foundational stuff at the core of it hasn't changed. And Adam Harris has a good piece on this at The Atlantic, which is interestingly interesting.
you know, the policy discussion here was about sort of the symptom and not the disease itself, if you will. And I don't really see a lot of momentum, interestingly, among liberals and among Democrats to make meaningful change to the way that college prices work. I see it much more in terms of the consumer end of it, which to me, and then I'll stop this little run, is interestingly a legacy of the Occupy Wall Street debt forgiveness movement,
which has really permeated the left and is one of the reasons why Elizabeth Warren, for example, has really started talking about this so much is to me, what happened with Biden, you can draw a pretty direct line to the sort of Occupy era of liberal politics. So it seems like you two agree, actually, that this isn't necessarily the good policy. I think if you asked a lot of people, even including some of the people who support this, they would not say that this is the best policy. I think there are a lot of reasons to critique it, you know, on top of what Chad was saying earlier.
there's been an argument that this could actually make things worse. You know, people might take on more debt. Increase the cost. Right. It might encourage colleges to raise tuition, thinking that, you know, more debt cancellation is coming down the line, or it might encourage borrowers to take on more debt, thinking it's not as risky a thing to do. You know, again, I think it's hard to predict how all of this will play out, but certainly, as Chad was saying, it's not addressing the root cause of
And, you know, there are all these debates, too, about whether it's helping people who don't really need the help. I mean, it's the kind of perfect Elizabeth Warren policy in the sense that, like, it very much benefits like Elizabeth Warren types of voters.
You can't talk about this without acknowledging that people who attend college, especially younger people who are more likely to have debt, it's a very democratic group. That's effective politics in some ways. You get elected into power and you do something that's a solid for the people that elected you. That's politics 101. It's a little cynical, but it's politics. People probably are a little bit cynical, but that's an important dimension of this.
Nate, I've seen you online comparing this to the corporate tax breaks that Trump enacted once he became president, which is like, this is a transactional version of politics. Whether it's good policy or not, people, as you said, do solids for the entities or the individuals who got them elected.
policy, you know, bona fides aside. Biden in particular is someone who is kind of a wheeler dealer type, right? He is like very good at balancing the different parts of the Democratic coalition against one another and negotiating and delivering on promises, right? And this was like a campaign promise that he is now delivered on. And, you know, in kind of some politics went one way, it's probably a useful thing to do.
I think as we're thinking about the impact of this policy on the ground, it's also important to remember that it's not just younger voters who are likely to disproportionately benefit from this. There was a really good piece on the site by Santul Nurkar back in May that was showing that canceling student debt
may actually be one of the better ways to at least start to close America's racial wealth gap. And he showed in that article that Black students borrow and owe more than white students. And this disparity just grows the further removed that young Americans get from college. So
So even though I think this is not perfect, and there are plenty of people who are saying that if you want to close the racial wealth gap, you really need to forgive a lot more debt. If we're thinking about just the practical impact and who it is likely to have an impact on, it is something that will disproportionately benefit young people and people of color. And that's something that could be important for Biden because those are groups that I think have been a little upset
with his inability so far to deliver on key campaign promises. So this could, in a sense, be trying to show those groups that he actually is doing concrete things that will help them. So we've had the, is this good policy debate, but from a, is this good politics perspective perspective,
what's the answer? Because he chose to do this two months before the election. He could have done this after the midterms if he wanted to. And he could have done it right after getting elected in 2020. To me, Galen, it gets back to what Nate was saying a little bit about what's priced in. So Nate was saying anger is sort of priced into the Democratic base.
anger about government handouts is priced into the Republican base as well, right? That that's not going to be something that really registers. And so, and so to me that this, I, this thing where if only 14% of the country is really paying attention, but this,
this is as personal of an issue as possible for those 14% or however many percent end up deciding to care about it, that there's a real chance of conversion. And I should say it's 40 some, it's 40 some percent who say they're closely paying attention, but only 14% of whom- I see, I'm sorry, I misunderstood. So, but all I have to say is, I do think that from a politics perspective,
There is a possibility of conversion on this because it's so directly affected. That may be another policy that if you just funded community colleges better, you know, that's not going to be the same kind of political conversion opportunity. And this connects to why Democrats were so interested in child tax credits as well, right? Democrats have really started to go toward...
an avenue in which the way that they support Americans is through direct relief to Americans in some way, which is different to me than past policies in past Democratic administrations.
But the child tax credit didn't help Democrats that much politically. Yeah, it ended up being unpopular. Yeah. So how do you think that comparison, so let's assume that's the right comparison to make here. What do you think that means for the political future of this decision, Chad? Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, when you say it didn't help much politically, you're talking about polling or actual electoral results?
I think, like, polling, like, I mean, it definitely... It ended up underwater. Yeah, and it helped people. It really helped the people who got it. But I don't think, you know, like, when it ended, there wasn't this sort of huge political clamor to let's keep this going. It sort of died quietly. And even though it worked...
I don't know. There hasn't really been any discussion about bringing it back. Yeah, that's a great point. And that was, I think, probably more directly tied to inflation than anything that will come out of this one just because of the size and the scope of it.
So, yeah, that's a point well taken. To me, it's in part about what are people going to say on this dump in October? And another point against my argument is that if some Democrats aren't even willing to talk about this, right, if Tim Ryan's not going to talk about this in Ohio, then who is it actually politically beneficial for? Because if it's only liberals who are talking about it to liberal bases, then that's more priced in stuff. So actually, maybe I'm all turned around. Maybe not good politics.
Nate, where do you come down? You seem more convinced, Nate, that this could be good politics.
I don't think they would have done it if it wasn't good, if they didn't think it was good politics, right? Which, I mean, obviously- Well, if they think it's good politics or it's good politics are two different questions, potentially. But Nate, say your- Well, there is a self-dealing element of this, which is that people who work in democratic politics are extremely likely to have college degrees and not be making that great an income, right? They're very likely to be in debt, in other words, right? Because these are not
great paying jobs, but they're jobs that require college degrees for the most part. But look, I mean, they took their time on this. I think the straightforward reading of that is that they kind of did tally up, like I said, like the balance sheet and look at the pluses and minuses. I mean, there are arguments you can make against it. You kind of see this in some GOP advertising, oh, I'm a
I didn't go to college, right? Now I have to pay for some philosophy graduate at Middlebury for her gender studies degree, right? That's like the stereotype that you'll hear. I'm not sure how effective that will be or not. There are like a lot of other issues, but that's the argument that you'll see made and maybe it'll sway some people. I don't know. I mean, I'm not sure how much the Tim Ryan argument is really –
Like, I don't know how much the sort of good politics aspect of this relies on Tim Ryan going out and talking to voters about this. I mean, I see this more as sort of like a base mobilization, basically getting young voters who had been pretty turned off from Biden and the Biden administration to want to come out and vote. And I
I don't know, maybe the Biden administration sees the kind of multiplicative effect. They want to be able to say they're doing something. This is a sort of clear thing that they can say they're doing. It's easy for people to understand. And then put that on top of what's happening with abortion, the economy getting worse.
better seemingly sort of inflation, maybe cooling down a little bit. Um, although I don't know, you know, we see that in economic indicators, I don't know how much people are actually like perceiving that on the ground. Um, but maybe there's an idea that all of this taken together, it will give these voters who don't always, who generally don't tend to turn out in midterm elections, both a reason to vote for Democrats and a reason to vote against Republicans.
Thank you, Chad.
There's potential for it to just not have an impact. But but I think that's that's more the idea rather than sort of being able to to get moderate voters to vote for Democrats. I saw it more as like trying to actually get young voters to vote at all. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really good point. And we've actually seen that during Biden's first year and a half plus, he has seen his most downward movement in approval polling amongst young voters.
young people overall, and in particular, young Democrats. And so that's a part of the polling that I'm going to be watching on this. I think we saw in 2018 that the drop off in terms of young voters turning out to the polls in the midterms was significantly like less than we usually expect in midterm voting. And so if they can, you know, Democrats can try to replicate that, of course, they're going to want to. And that's one of the biggest pitfalls of
the midterm cycle for Democrats usually, which is that one of their most supportive groups doesn't turn out. And so, you know, we're going to get polling back on this and we'll get exit polls eventually. And so we will be able to answer better whether or not this was good politics. But for now, I think this has been a fruitful debate and we are going to let Chad go and say hello to our politics editor, Sarah Frostenson. But Chad, thank you so much for joining the podcast today. Bye guys. What a treat. I'll talk to you next time.
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In place of our regular good use of polling or bad use of polling segment, today we have more of a good use of data or bad use of data. And to do that, joining us is politics editor Sarah Frostenson. Hello, Sarah, and welcome to the podcast. Hey, y'all. Okay, so last week, the New York Times Upshot and the Philadelphia Inquirer published analyses showing that voter registration amongst women grew in a number of states after the Dobbs decision.
The Upshot noted that, quote, in the weeks after the court's decision, more than 70 percent of newly registered voters in Kansas were women, according to analysis of the state's registered voter list. They looked at 10 states overall and found, quote, the increase varied greatly across the 10 states, Kansas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Oklahoma, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio,
Idaho, Alabama, New Mexico, and Maine, with some states showing a pronounced surge in the share of new registrants who were women and others showing little change at all. The total number of women registering to vote in those states rose by about 35% after the decision compared with the month before the leak. Men had an uptick of 9%.
They then conclude, quote, on its own, the rise in registration does not necessarily mean much. The new registrants make up a tiny fraction of the electorate. The share of all registered voters in those 10 states who are women remains essentially unchanged. But the increase in registration among women is nonetheless consistent with a broader constellation of evidence suggesting that the court's ruling has motivated voters to the advantage of Democrats.
So, here's the conflict, which is probably pretty obvious at this point. On one hand, this seems like significant news. You know, in places like Kansas, the share of women registering to vote increasing by 70%. On the other hand, they say in their own reporting that it doesn't seem to matter. So, help me make sense of this. Is this a good use of data or a bad use of data?
Sarah, kick us off. I wanted to see what Nate and Amelia were going to say so I could be a voice of contention. Don't worry, Sarah. I'll fight with you whatever you say if I promise that. Do you feel more comfortable? That sounds good. That sounds good. Okay. My honest read on it is that this was a bad use of data. I really like the work that the upshot does, but
But overall, they're not finding a trend that has continued to increase. If anything, it's like dipped off after the numbers here in August. And the other thing is it wasn't consistent across all states. The upticks that they observed from May were like five points roughly. Also, one thing that I thought really undercut the argument was in the piece, they looked at both women who'd registered as Republicans,
and as Democrats in Kansas. And yes, there were more women who registered as Democrats, but there was also a spike among Republican women. And I think something we've covered more broadly at FiveThirtyEight is that abortion isn't just a women's issue. You know, it's something that really is shaped by how you vote. Republican women tend to, you know, be less supportive of abortion, whereas, you know, Democratic men are more supportive than Republican women. Okay. Who would like to go next? I mean...
I think it seems like a decent use of data to me. They are making the whole constellation argument, right? This is part of a number of indicators that show the political climate shifting. I'm not aware of a lot of other times where you have a gender imbalance in voter registration. Is it the best indicator? No. I think the best indicator is the actual election results
And or the polls showing a lot of Senate races shifting, for example, the generic ballot. But it's a part of that story, I think. But OK, can you speak specifically to the idea that in a micro sense, it's interesting, but on a macro sense, it seems irrelevant? Well, I don't know what is relevant or what's not right. I mean, some elections are are determined by one vote. Right. How close was Florida in 2020?
2000, I think it was like 537 votes or something like that. So politics is all about the margins. And I think the Dobbs decision has had a large marginal effect relative to other political events. And this is part of that. All right. So I promised to fight with Sarah. I will deliver on that. So I'm going to say this is a good use of data, even though that is not totally how I was planning to talk about this. But here goes.
So I think it's a good use of data because it is showing something that we can see in other places. As Nate was saying, it's part of a broader, you know, to use their words, constellation of evidence that some voters are being motivated by Dobbs. And it's giving us a sense of how that motivation is actually being translated into action and
And I think the Kansas results are particularly relevant for that because there you had people who were actually able to vote on abortion in August, and we saw their behavior in the lead up to that election. And they found that, as Galen had said, more than 70% of newly registered voters in Kansas were women, which is interesting to me in part because
My general bias is actually to assume that, you know, abortion is is not a women's issue in the way that people make it out to be that, as Sarah was saying, you know, the idea that this is an issue where women are on one side and men are on the other side.
That's really not borne out by the evidence. There are plenty of women who oppose abortion. There are plenty of men who support it. So it is interesting to see this trend among women. Of course, we don't know that these were all women who were planning to vote in favor of abortion rights.
But the referendum came out very solidly in that direction. So I think this is a useful data point. Do I think that it is something we should be relying on exclusively to figure out how voters are reacting to the Dobbs decision and how they might vote in the midterms? No.
I do think Amelia and Nate make some really good points. I just think in terms of like this broader constellation, that this is probably the weakest point in favor of that because of the stat that the Times drills on, you know, drills into, which is this idea that
That the registration uptick has begun to fade and that the share of all registered voters in those 10 states who are women remains essentially unchanged. That to me is a pretty large caveat to put in a piece to then point to something that is supposed to be indicative of
Democrats gaining ground in these states. I think the strongest argument in favor of it is something we've talked about before, is this idea that abortion and how it's going to play out is going to vary from state to state. And I did think that the upshot piece did a great job of talking about what things look like in Kansas and Pennsylvania and a state like Ohio that has restrictions versus somewhere like Maine where
abortion isn't on the ballot in the same way, or a state like New Mexico where abortion also isn't something that's expected to be challenged. But again, I think these are like micro changes we're looking at and in the macro, which is what so much of the other data, whether it's the generic ballot, special election results, is kind of about this macro picture. I'm just not sure that this tells us much from a macro lens.
I found it interesting, Amelia, and Sarah, to some extent, the way that you described abortion as being less of a women's issue than a partisan issue, right? Like, yes, you said there are many Republican women who oppose abortion and there are many Democratic men who support abortion.
But looking at the polling, so in this article, the New York Times cites a Times Siena poll that showed that after the Dobbs decision, 9% of women ranked abortion as their most important issue compared with only 1% of men. And, you know, if you have been paying attention to the news or activism in the time since the Dobbs decision, 9%.
A lot of the activism does seem to be led by women. That's, you know, not even anecdata. That's just a sort of observation from watching the news or seeing protests here in New York. There has to be some difference, right, between like how women and men react to this issue. And maybe this data is more evidence of that, actually.
So I think you're bringing up a good point, Galen, which is that just because when you look at polling on people's views about whether abortion should be legal or not, you don't see big differences between men and women overall. But there is an intensity difference.
that women are generally more likely to prioritize this as an issue and perhaps get more involved in activism around it. And that's one thing that I've actually just been curious about in the lead up to the midterms. Would we see women, especially on the left, being more mobilized by the Dobbs decision? And, you know, there is evidence, not just in this analysis, that
that is happening. Um, there was a Kaiser family foundation poll that was released in early August, and it found that there was an increase in the importance of abortion as a midterms voting issue, particularly among Democrats as a whole, but also democratic women and all women voters between the ages of 18 and 49. So reproductive age women. Um, so, you know, I think there, there is evidence that, um,
this is an issue that could be motivating a specific group of women. I guess what I have a problem with is looking at an uptick in registrations among women and assuming that that will benefit Democrats, because, you know, I think you can, there, there are some assumptions that go into that, um, that are perhaps defensible. You know, there has been a change that,
makes people angry on the left side, so they're more likely to mobilize. But there are plenty of women who oppose abortion. And I think that's something that often gets left out of the debate. And I think that's my main objection to that framing, that, you know, there are lots of Democratic women for whom this does seem to be an increasingly important issue. But I guess,
I would have liked to see that spun out a little bit more in the upshot piece. Not to renege on my label of good use of data, but this is just a pet peeve of mine.
Yeah, and I would say like what the upshot cites in defense of women being more likely than men to say abortion should be legal is a pupil that shows a three-point gap. So, I mean, that's a very small gap on this issue. But I do think that there, you know, to Amelia's point, there is evidence that women are more motivated by this issue, more likely to weight it as important. But I do think some of the emphasis on what women are doing misses the larger picture on this issue.
And I think it misses the fact that, you know, I'm interested in how Democratic men are responding to the Dobbs decision, you know, because I think like I'm interested generally in how like the whole Democratic coalition and also how, you know, for example, independent men are responding to it. So I think, you know, in a sense, like the the focus on women, for
fine, let's look at how women are responding. But I also want to know how other groups are responding to this. And I think there's just sort of an assumption that women are going to be more motivated and maybe that will prove to be true. But I just prefer not to go in with that lens. I mean, are we seeing evidence in the polling more broadly that the gender gap is widening or contracting? Yeah.
Well, actually, one interesting element is that related to the segment earlier about who goes to college. More and more, it's women who go to college and not men. So as you have Democrats rely more and more on college traded voters, it's going to be women more and more, too, especially among younger women.
Yeah. So I'm looking at a recent Pew survey with midterm election preferences, and it's showing 41% of men preferring the Democratic candidate, 47% preferring the Republican candidate, and then 47% of women preferring the Democratic candidate and 38% preferring the Republican candidate. So that's a difference, but it's not a huge one. And I think it
sort of reinforces something that we saw during Trump's presidency and the 2016 and 2020 elections, especially that women as a voting block are actually quite complicated and they're the way they think about politics is can be very different. And that white women in particular think about politics differently than women of color. Um, so, um,
I am less inclined to put a lot of stock into the gender gap, I think, especially after 2020. But it is something that is good to continue to keep an eye on, especially in the upcoming midterms.
One thing, Sarah, that you mentioned was that we've seen the increase in registration amongst women now fall back down to basically where it was before jobs. I mean, I think it's still slightly elevated, but almost back to where it was. Should we take that to mean that the salience of this issue is fading? What should we make of that? If we're going to make something of the increase, what should we make of the decrease?
That's the million dollar question. I mean, right now we're all trying to figure out this extent of, OK, we've seen a trend among special elections. Democrats are doing better. The generic ballot shows a really close race. But is it going to last? Historical precedence suggests that no, Republicans will start to gain ground here in the lead up to November. But I mean, I think.
One thing that was interesting in particular in Kansas was even though we saw this uptick in voter registration, we saw really high turnout, it wasn't a neat one-to-one relationship in the Democratic governor primary, for instance,
We have seen, though, Democratic overperformance in other types of House races with these special elections. But I do think it's this question of whether Democrats are going to be able to successfully convert energy around abortion into electoral wins.
All right, Sarah, as you said, it's the million dollar question, the answer to which we will find out. But we have a Sarah from you. We had a bad use of data. Nate from you. We had a good use of data. Amelia, I feel like we had a good use of data and then like a kind of bad use of data. So I think it might be the tie breaking vote here.
I think, you know, I think it's a good use of data with an asterisk. Are we allowed to add asterisks? Can I add that to the system? You know, we've never truly mailed out an award one way or the other. So it's all just going to remain in our heads. If you would like to add an asterisk, you're welcome to. It sounds like it averages out to good. With that, let's talk about the recent uptick in Biden's approval rating.
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Over the past month, President Biden's approval rating has ticked up nearly five points, from 37.5% approval in late July to now 42.3% approval. He is still underwater and still generally around where Trump was at this point in his presidency, but the narrative about his presidency seems to have changed noticeably.
Earlier this month, for example, Jonathan Chait wrote a piece in New York Magazine titled Joe Biden's Best Week Ever, in which he details his policy successes, both bipartisan and partisan, and suggests the urgency from his party to be done with him has receded. So is it fair to say that we are seeing something of a Biden renaissance, a pivot in narratives? What is going on here?
So you have various things, right? You have on the one hand, you do have the Dobbs decision that we're talking about a moment ago. On the second hand, you have various legislative and I guess now executive branch successes or at least policy enactments, right? And third, you have some improving underlying conditions. So the economy has been doing a little better lately. At least inflation has been lower in the last couple of reports.
you haven't had a new COVID wave like you had with Delta last year or something. There's a lot of people getting COVID, but not a lot of people dying relative to previous waves. Still a lot in absolute numbers. So conditions are improving. And I think, you know, to the extent the public's a weather vain, they're giving Biden some credit for that. Nate, I am curious, though. I want to drill down on something here because –
The improvement in Biden's approval rating hasn't tracked with, for example, improvement in Democrats' lot. The improvement for Biden has really happened just in the past month. Like he hit his nadir in late July, July 22nd, I think it is, according to our approval tracker. So it seems like really for Biden specifically, something has happened within the past month and not, say, since mid-June.
Maybe. I mean, I wouldn't overestimate our ability to be that precise about timing these things exactly, although there are lots of approval rating polls. Look, I mean, there's something of a mystery why Biden's approval rating had fallen so much to begin with. It seemed to start
Last summer, when there were a number of things going on, including the Afghanistan withdrawal, including the Delta wave of coronavirus, including inflation starting to rise. I mean, Democrats have seen their position improve on the generic ballot and other things. But I think there were like a fair number of actually Democrats who were disappointed,
in Biden. And again, we're disappointed and angry or whatever you want to call it, right? They're the ones who now have some things to cheer about and are maybe some of the first people to come back on board, I think, right? They were not people that probably were ever at much risk of voting Republican in any election upcoming, but they've come back into the fold for now at least.
But so of independents. I mean, this was something that former 538-er Walt Hickey wrote about at Business Insider. And he was looking at a Gallup poll done here in August. And it was a six-point gain for Biden overall, yes, but nine points among independents. And Morning Consult had similar polling out in August that also showed a jump among independents.
And one thing they cited in favor of that was strong approval of the Inflation Reduction Act, which had the sweeping climate change legislation embedded in it. I mean, one thing I'm curious to see is Biden just announced the student loan forgiveness plan last week, August 25th, so that wouldn't really be captured in the
polls yet in terms of people's approval of it. And it was something that like centrist Democrats didn't love. There were some reports on, oh, it could contribute to inflation. I agree that it's something that makes maybe parts of the Democratic base really excited, though there were criticisms from some on the left that it didn't go far enough.
I'm curious by that decision. You know, I don't know to what extent we can really attribute policy changes to helping Biden's numbers. I do think it's, you know, larger that we're seeing gas prices come down. I think people are really feeling that. And that's probably more so what's being captured in his approval rating. But at the same time, I'm curious to see how the student loan stuff plays out.
Yeah. I mean, if I were going to be super reductive, I would just say gas prices peaked. We're at a really high level in, I'm looking, looks like they peaked in like early to mid June and then they started falling really steeply. And so the point at which people would have noticed that and started registering it and in particular, like falling below $4 a gallon, I think those symbolic, um,
dips are important for the way people think about whether something's improving. I think that has a lot to do with it. Yeah. What other groups can we look at and say, oh, Biden has disproportionately made up ground or attracted these people? You said independence, Sarah. Are we seeing particular movement amongst people
Democrats themselves or young people, old people. I mean, as we mentioned, he's made some of his biggest losses with young people. He's also made some of his big losses, biggest losses with Hispanic voters, for example. Do we know who he's gaining ground with?
It's an interesting question, Galen. I took a look at YouGov's trend for Biden approval. And one thing that I thought was interesting is I looked at men versus women, I guess, going back on what I was saying about the gender gap a little while ago. And it's interesting to see that actually Biden's numbers are not really different.
improving among women, but they have improved quite substantially among men. So, you know, I don't totally know what to make of that, because I think if you were assuming that the Dobbs decision would motivate women and perhaps make women feel more favorably about a democratic administration that supports abortion rights,
You might expect that women would be feeling more positively about the Biden administration. That is not what I'm seeing, at least in the YouGov trend. I mean, the argument against it, of course, is, you know, the Dobbs decision happened and there was really very little the Biden administration could do to respond to the Supreme Court.
Um, so it could be that, you know, it, it wouldn't actually be reasonable to expect women's approval of Biden to go up for that reason because Biden didn't actually do a lot. Um, so I don't know. I mean, it could just be that it has nothing to do with abortion, but, um, but I do think there are a lot of, of factors here in addition to gas prices that I just mentioned.
And looking at some of these other trends, so Black voters not seeing really much of an uptick in approval at all, again, according to this YouGov trend data, Hispanic voters...
It's a similar dynamic, maybe a tiny increase, not huge, although small increases in approval are meaningful given how static this tends to be these days. And then...
a small increase in approval among white voters. Um, so that is interesting that, you know, it seems like Biden's numbers are improving, albeit not like, you know, dramatically among white and Hispanic voters, not among black voters. Um, and then looking at age, um, so if we look at the youngest age group, um, Biden's approval is basically,
not going up among under 30. However, it did go up quite substantially among ages 30 to 44. So that's interesting. I'm curious what you make of that, Nate and Sarah. I mean, we should probably have a product where we average different polls with different demographic subgroups. My general
tendency is to be wary of these changes, which can be subject to small sample size and other methodological issues, I guess. Yeah, no, that's a very good point, Nate. And I should say, you know, I think I said this, but like, I'm just looking at one trend from one poll. And so we shouldn't read too much into it. You know, it seemed something like approval for Biden and intention to vote for Democrats in the midterms
had sort of like decreased in correlation, right? We were seeing Democrats improve their lot in generic ballot polling while Biden hadn't really been improving. Should we think of this as something more of a return to the mean and now Biden's approval getting more in line with generic ballot polling? Or is this like good news on top of all of that for Democrats? Should we expect the generic ballot polling to increase even more now that Biden's approval is going up? Sort of like, which is, is this just a lagging indicator at the end of the day?
I it's funny you say lagging indicator. That's what I was going to say to describe Biden's approval rating, because it does feel like that. Like we've seen this generic ballot shift before Biden's numbers started to tick up. And I think, you know, maybe Nate will disagree with me here. But he had a piece earlier this year that was saying, you know, Biden's approval numbers might change.
be bad, but that doesn't necessarily tell us much about the midterm in the sense that our better factor to look at there is the generic ballot polling. So I'm not sure that we can like look at this uptick in Biden's approval and be like, oh, this is great news for Democrats. We're going to see, you know, X, Y, Z happen as a result. Yeah, I tend to agree. I mean, I think when you have this kind of gap between the generic ballot and approval ratings, then the generic ballot was the more relevant indicator anyway for 2022, maybe not 2024, right? Yeah.
And also, maybe also mean reverting in the sense of it was a little bit of a mystery why Biden's numbers were so low, right? I mean, most presidents are pretty unpopular now. But he was kind of even lower than Trump had been or about the same as Trump had been in a comparable stage to the presidency. And so maybe there is some mean reversion here. Yeah. I mean, I think
I think it's possible that as Biden's ratings get better, he'll just become less of a factor in voters' decision making. And there's a recent Pew survey that I think supports that, which is it found that currently about half of registered voters say that Biden is not much of a factor in their midterm vote. 31% think of their vote as a vote against Biden and 19% see it as a vote for him.
And the share saying that Biden isn't much of a factor in the voting decision has increased 11 percentage points since March. And that's a shift that's happened among Democrats as well as Republicans. So I wouldn't necessarily see, you know, Biden's approval numbers going up and say, oh, you know, this is going to be great for Democrats in November. I just think it might mean
that people are thinking less negatively about Biden and are not thinking about him at all now, rather than thinking about him positively in a way that would make them want to vote for Democrats. All right. Well, we've covered a lot of ground in today's show. As usual, there's a lot that remains to be seen, and we will talk about that data when we get it. But is that it? Is that a wrap? Anyone have any closing thoughts for the day?
We're in a biden-sance. Is that how you say it, Galen? Biden-sance? Biden-sance? Biden-sance. Okay, biden-sance. Got it. Is that a thing? Originally, I had that in the script, and then I took it out, and then Chad put it back in, and I was like, is that too corny? A biden-sance. It's corny, but that's 538. I know. It's never too corny. A little corny. Yeah, come on. Gotta have a little fun.
All right. We'll leave it there. Thank you, Sarah, Amelia, and Nate. Thanks, Galen. Thanks, y'all. Thank you, guys. My name is Galen Druk. Sophia Leibovitz is in the control room. Chadwick Matlin is our editorial director, and Emily Vanesky is our intern. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon. Bye.
