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Do you ever get confused for Nate Silver? Like, do people ever email your times address and say like, I don't know why your model says like this, but I almost never get
through like professional channels that suppose that I'm Nate Silver. If I like meet someone for the first time and I like explain what my job is and that my name is Nate, like there is often an effort to either figure out which one I am or also people just know who Nate Silver is because he's more famous than I am. So like that's, I'd be like, no, he left the Times. That's not me. You know, that sort of thing definitely happens, but yeah.
I think it becomes less common over time. On behalf of FiveThirtyEight, I'm sorry for the confusion, and I'm glad to hear that it's decreased. Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Dweck.
For folks who are interested in what Americans think about the state of our country and its politics, we got lots of new data from The New York Times and Siena College last week. They released their first round of midterms polling covering a wide range of questions from views on Biden and Trump to the state of the economy and our democracy.
The answer to just about all of those questions is not great. Americans are pretty pessimistic, and they're pessimistic about both the direction of the country and the people leading both parties. For regular listeners or really perhaps any American, that might not be surprising. But beyond the pessimism, we also learned how Americans want things to be different, from some clues for future elections to how the party's coalitions could continue to evolve.
And here with us to unpack all of that is Nate Cohn, the chief political analyst at The New York Times, who heads up The Times' Sienna poll. Welcome back to the podcast, Nate. Thank you. It's good to be back. Also here with us is FiveThirtyEight Politics editor Sarah Frostenson. Hey, Sarah. Hey, y'all. So before we dive in, I do want to mention a little housekeeping at the top. So this week and next week, we're only going to have one podcast per week,
I am going on vacation, so I invite all of you to join me by going outside and thinking about things that have nothing to do with politics. Of course, still listen to our one podcast that does come out. Then I will be back and we will pick back up with two podcasts a week.
The other thing I should mention, I heard from some listeners that for some reason last Thursday's podcast showed up as a repeat of Monday's podcast on some platforms. Not sure why that happened, but if you want to hear all about Georgia politics with Greg Blustein, the correct podcast is posted in the Apple podcast app. You can also, of course, watch the podcasts on YouTube. We've got all of that out of the way.
Nate, we usually begin with a good or bad use of polling. We will not subject the Times-Siena poll to this treatment. I think it's fair to say that it is a good use of polling. Thank you for spending all of that time and energy trying to figure out what Americans think about a whole host of things.
We are still going to have a good or bad use of polling segment today, though, and we are going to focus in on a recent morning consult poll. So are you ready to play along with good use or bad use of polling? I am ready. All right. We love to hear it. So last week, the latest Consumer Price Index data showed that prices had risen 9.1% over the past year, which was similar to past recent months, a 40-year high.
Morning Consult also released a poll last week showing that two out of three voters think that the United States is currently in a recession. Of course, economic data comes in at a delay, but as far as we know, and according to the most recent projections from economists, we are not currently in a recession.
Nonetheless, that two-thirds number is higher than the 51% of Americans who said the country was in a recession in the spring of 2020, when the country was actually in a recession and we were seeing an unprecedented surge in layoffs.
We've talked about this kind of polling to some extent before on the podcast, but I'm curious, is it a good use of polling to ask Americans a factual question like, are we in a recession? And does the seemingly inaccurate response from Americans tell us something useful? Yeah.
Sarah, I'll let you kick us off to show Nate how it's done. Is this a good or bad use of polling? Okay. I would actually say it's a good use of polling. And that's because when it comes to perceptions of the economy, research has found time and again that public perceptions are often closely correlated with the actual economic conditions. As you were saying, Galen, it's really challenging to predict a recession. Economists were horribly off when they was trying to understand the impact of the coronavirus in 2020.
But research suggests that regular people have an understanding of what woes and problems they're facing on a daily basis when it comes to buying goods, what it's like in the economy. And also keep in mind, a recession can only be classified retrospectively. We could be in a recession right now if the second quarter of GDP is down.
And I think the last point I would make is that there's also evidence that media coverage around the economy, around recessions, often follows public opinion versus media coverage setting how people think about the economy. That was something FiveThirtyEight contributor Dan Hopkins found in his research.
And so what that all boils down to is I think a lot of times when people say that they are facing real economic woes, you should take that at face value because whether or not that, you know, macro is true, it will affect how they vote. Interesting. Nick, do you agree?
I think I do. I'll say it's an okay use of polling just to be a little contrarian. But I think it's useful right now. As a general proposition, I don't know how useful it is. I think it's true that recession is a technical term that Americans only have a very imperfect understanding of. I do think it tells us that many Americans think the economy is bad. But I would rather just ask them if they think economic conditions are good or bad or poor or something like that. That's what the Times-Yenna poll does. But at this particular moment, I do think that there is an insight to be gleaned
from this question because as sarah mentioned there is a case that we are in a recession right now i could be misspeaking so i shouldn't i probably shouldn't be saying this but i'll go ahead and say anyway that i think someone told me that like maybe the atlanta fed was had a paper that suggested we were already in a recession and so it's possible that in the weeks ahead that there could be a determination that we are in a recession there could be media coverage that effect and if voters already believe we're in a recession then that might attenuate some of the political consequences of that
kind of decision. And it won't be surprising who's the American public. And I'm glad to know that. Yeah. So I guess I should say the way that this polling response was framed by Morning Consult is that for all we know, we aren't in a recession. No one has declared that we're in a recession. And so we're sort of framing this as
A notable result because more Americans think that the economy is contracting than thought the economy was contracting when we knew that it was back in spring of 2020. Nate, you found also in your Times and Siena College polling that Americans are more pessimistic now than they were at certain points throughout 2020 when, for example, we were in recession, when...
coronavirus was raging and people weren't vaccinated. Why? Does it all boil down to inflation? I can't succinctly answer the question why. It seems to me like there are at least two factors that I would point to, though. One is it seems like most of the movement is among Republicans. Republicans in 2020 continued to believe that the economy was in fundamentally good
and they do not believe that today. You could attribute that to the effects of partisanship, that Donald Trump was the president at the time, you could attribute it, and that Joe Biden is now, or you could attribute it to a second possibility, which is that there is a case that maybe the fundamentals of the economy are more clearly problematic today than they were in March and April of 2020. In March and April of 2020, I could imagine telling myself a story that said the economy is fundamentally fine, but it's sort of on pause at the moment because, again,
of the coronavirus and that if the coronavirus wasn't here, things would magically snap into place. Many Democrats believe that after all, that was sort of the theory of why things might be looking pretty good for the Democrats politically if Joe Biden became the president and if the coronavirus could be brought under control. I think today that notion is a lot more challenging to sustain. The coronavirus is no longer much of a drag on the economy and it's exposed more deep and fundamental distortions than simply a suppression of demand due to quarantines and
and other measures to stop the spread. So I think there is, I can imagine a credible case that someone could believe that the fundamentals of the economy are weaker today or have been demonstrated to be weaker today than they were understood to be at the time or understood to be in April 2020. Yeah, absolutely. Who thought like two years after the first start of the lockdowns in the US, we would still be in this position where a lot of white collar workers are still working remotely,
All of us, it seems. All of us currently. And then, right, like, you know, right now there's infections of the coronavirus, not as deadly in some instances, thanks to vaccinations, but still, like, life is disrupted. I think that shapes then pessimism that people have, because I think, Galen, we were talking about
Maybe, I think, after the first wave of vaccinations, a lot of polling was suggesting that Americans were really optimistic about the direction the country was headed. But that was before the Delta variant, before the Omicron variant. And I think as Nate was saying, like, we've seen then real fractures exposed in our economy and how that works. And one thing I would note is it's not just Republicans who are souring on the economy. One thing we found, you know, there's been this debate in political science about
how much of the economy is shaped by partisans' views, with the idea being that, right, if a Democrat's in the White House, a Republican is sour then on the economy. But one thing we've seen with Biden's low approval numbers is Democrats, too, are upset about the economy. And in fact, according to
The University of Michigan's consumer sentiment data, they show that Democrats currently have the lowest view of the economy now than they did at any point in Trump's presidency. So I do think there are real economic factors, regardless of partisanship, that are being shaped in how people think about the economy now. Yeah, it is interesting to parse how much of people's perceptions are based on partisanship and how much is based on reality, because we do know that economic perceptions are biased.
sort of affected by partisanship. So in this morning consult poll, we see that in spring of 2020, 66% of Democrats thought that we were in a recession, whereas now it's 53%. So that has gone down slightly over that period of time. Republicans, on the other hand, 37% thought that we were in a recession in March of 2020. 78% think we're in a recession now.
That is sort of indicative of, I think, partisanship to a certain degree. So like, given that, does that dampen how much we should expect this sort of like, whether or not we're in a recession question to ultimately shape
spending and behavior. And because there is this argument that like, like you said, Sarah, believe people when they tell you the economy is bad, because even if we're not in a recession now, belief that we're in a recession could ultimately lead to a recession. But if what people are also expressing is just their partisanship, does that mean we should pay less attention?
That's a complicated question. I think, though, and this was actually something in the Time-Siena poll, they showed, right, that among college-educated whites who identified as Democrats, only 17%, I believe, said that an economic concern was their top concern. I don't think there were breakouts among non-educated Democrats, but among, like, the non-educated whites.
uneducated Americans writ large, economic concerns were much more of an issue. And so I do think there is a tendency then by just focusing in on partisanship, we're missing a lot of people who don't identify strongly as Democrat or Republican, but still vote, go in and out of elections. And I think those are the people who are most affected by this.
and will probably vote most on that factor here in the 2022 midterms? I think it's a really interesting question. I mean, imagine that the Democrats one day elect a Bernie Sanders or an Elizabeth Warren who strikes fear into the hearts of
plutocrats and business people in the country. Is that alone enough to plunge us into a recession nowadays because politics is strong enough to influence their attitudes about the economy and their likelihood of making investments? I mean, I have no idea, but I think it's certain that the more that politics appears to color people's perceptions of the economy, the more you can imagine some interesting economic fallout from changes in American politics. All right. So all in all, we got a good use of polling from Sarah, an okay use of polling from the
Nate, on a zero to 10 scale, where does that leave us? Like a six or a seven? 6.5. 6.5? It's fine, you know. Okay, all right, all right. Fair enough. Well, let's get to a great use of polling and talk about the latest times polling.
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As I mentioned, The Times and Santa College released their first round of midterm polling last week. And here are some of the top line numbers. Just 13% of Americans said the country is on the right track.
And President Biden's approval rating came in at 33%. By the way, that's a bit lower than what the 530 average shows, which is 39%. The race for Congress is neck and neck with the two parties tied in the low 40s. That's similar to what the 530 average shows. And both Biden and Trump have some weaknesses with their own party's voters. That's just a sampling of all of the information we got. We've got a lot more to dig into, but let's begin with
Nate, what do you think was the most important thing that you learned from this initial round of midterm polling? The most important overarching finding is that Americans aren't just more dissatisfied with the direction of the country, but that it's beginning to take a toll on the
on their willingness to follow the usual conventions of American politics in different ways. They're likelier to say that they support major reforms to the fundamentals of the political system. They're less likely to support renominating Joe Biden for president, which is something you would usually expect. They're less likely to say that Joe Biden was the legitimate winner of the last election.
Donald Trump is less likely to have support from Republicans than he did two years ago. It just seems like this gen that the general dissatisfaction with the direction of the country is undermining some of the usual assumptions that you could make. And it's not always causal. Like I'm not going to argue that the direction of the country is the reason why, um, Donald Trump is, um,
viewed more unfavorably than it was two years ago or why Republicans cast doubt on the outcome of the last election. But I think it adds up to a much more pessimistic mood than even other points in recent history when we would usually characterize the public as in a pretty sour mood. We started asking different questions as a result. We were asking a new question on top of the right track, wrong direction question, asking people whether they're optimistic about whether the country can get back.
on the right track. And the majority of Americans said they were optimistic about that. So I think that's an important caveat for now. But, you know, in another year, I'm interested to see whether that flips and maybe people start doubting whether America can ever get back on the right track. It's interesting hearing you say all of that. It strikes me as the kind of environment where, you know, pundits usually argue that a change style candidate would do
very well. We will see if someone like that emerges. But Sarah, what stuck out to you the most in all of this data? On that note, the thing that stood out most to me was what it told us about the party's bases.
and the shifts we're seeing happen there. And it was particularly interesting, I think, what we see among Democrats, because one question I've had going into the midterms is, you know, how much of what we saw in 2020 with Latino voters was more of a blip or a sign of a new trend? And I think this poll, along with other polls, is echoing that this is a possible, dare I say, like realignment happening in terms of Latino voters identifying more with Republican voters. And I think it's a
a very dramatic coalitional shift that could potentially be underway with the party's voters. And just as we were talking about earlier in the first segment, how striking it is for how different Americans then as a result view different issues, right? Only 17% of white college educated Democrats saying that an economic issue was top of mind for them.
Whereas, you know, lower income Americans were always saying that the economy was super important to them in that survey. And I think it just speaks to some of the divides Nate is highlighting in terms of the direction the country is moving in and just little agreement on what the best path forward should be. I think that the class divide in the Democratic Party is significant.
one of the most important themes of the last 15 years of American politics. And it looks like the recent news events have driven it into overdrive. On the one hand, you have a weak economy that is continuing to erode Democratic support among working class voters who care about bread and butter economic issues and back the Democrats because they believe Democrats are on the side of working people. On the other hand, we have an incredible month of news that has heightened every liberal Democratic concern you can come up with that the
The fate of democracy is at stake in January 6th hearings that are being aired every couple of weeks. Roe versus Wade was overturned. There's a spate of mass shootings. And that's doing everything you can imagine and more for the moment to energize white college-educated liberals. I mean, liberals of all demographic groups, but that is predominantly white college graduates.
And the result is that Democrats are doing better than ever among white college graduates, at least in this poll, and doing much worse than they've done before in our surveys, at least among Latino and other non-black, non-white voters. It's interesting to me that Democrats are still, at least in this survey, holding up among black voters.
I think it is worth cautioning that these sample sizes are pretty small. We're talking about 100, 110 Black voters or Latino voters in a survey maybe. If we're going to redo the poll tomorrow, I mean, maybe Biden's approval rating would be a little healthier among Latino voters than our poll showed it. Maybe Democrats would stretch out a little bit more of a lead. Maybe not. But broadly speaking, the overall trend lines are clear. They date back a decade.
And it's easy to tell a story about why what's happening right now would only tend to exacerbate those long-term trends. Yeah, we were going to wait a little bit later into the podcast to sort of dig into this realignment theme, but we're here. So let's just talk about it. You write, based on this poll, that for the first time in a Times-Siena national poll, Democrats' share of support for college white graduates was higher than for non-white voters.
So that's sort of like trends that we've seen, as you mentioned, for a decade or more now getting to the point where like the two lines cross on the graph. If this trend continues where white college educated voters who for a long time served as somewhat of a base for the country club style Republican Party that we knew in maybe the 80s and 90s, even through Bush.
If that part of the country increasingly votes for Democrats and that voters of color start to become more evenly divided between the two parties, what does that mean long term for the two parties' coalitions, how they compete on the national map, what kinds of issues the parties maybe even campaign on or legislate on when they're in office? How would this trend, if continuing along the lines that the Time-Siena poll shows us, change our politics?
That is a very good and big question. One thing that I would add that I think is important to toss in is that the poll also shows further attenuation and Democratic support among white voters without a degree. Biden was down to like a 20 percent approval rate. I don't remember the number, but Democrats were at 23 percent white voters without a degree.
They were still at 24% among likely voters. So what we're really seeing is a cleavage between college graduates and especially white college graduates and people without a degree, and especially white voters without a degree. You know, in terms of the structure of our electoral politics, it would tend to exacerbate the longer-term trend towards growing Democratic disadvantages in the Senate and the Electoral College. White voters without a degree, or rather, white college graduates are concentrated in a relatively small number of states along the coasts and in a few large metro areas in the center of the country, like around Atlanta.
Atlanta or Houston and Dallas. It should be noted that Democratic weakness among Latino voters might have a countervailing effect. Latino voters are also disproportionately concentrated in non-competitive states. And so you could imagine that Democratic losses among Latino voters cut away at Democratic margins to California and New York one day and Illinois for that matter, and that maybe that would slightly cut against the overall negative trend. But that was true in 2022 with TOO after all. In 2020, Democrats lost a lot of ground
among Latino voters. And that probably did prevent Democrats from being at a five-point deficit in the tipping point state with respect to the national vote. But the overall trend line towards educational polarization is nonetheless pushing the Democrats into a bigger structural hole in their fight for control of government. And I think you can already see the tensions playing out inside of government. The highly educated wing of the Democratic Party just has very different priorities than
than the rest of the country. And that's not to say those priorities are wrong, but they're different. They're more abstract. They depend on having a certain set of values and then a sort of almost quasi-scientific worldview that conceives of the way that we think about problems in terms of inequality and different population level effects or climate change. These very abstract and very important concerns, but ones that are difficult to connect with more mundane, everyday realities at the individual level.
And it can put the Democrats in a position like the one they're in now, where their governing priorities are not necessarily aligned with the electorate. And I think that's where the conditions for populism come from, when a large group of people don't believe that their needs and desires are being met by politicians in Washington. And that makes it possible for an outsider to sort of claim they're going to represent the people. So I think that we're already seeing some of these trends play out. Resurgent populism seems like a very natural consequence of a
a highly educated technocratic group of voters with abstract concerns prevailing over decision making in D.C.? It raises, though, I think, really interesting questions around how the two parties then are going to message themselves. The Democratic Party has long been the party of unionization of the working class voter. As Nate points out, though, it has shifted away from that. Right. But that doesn't mean there's been a lot of efforts among Republicans right
around this idea that they will now be the party of the working class. But they haven't necessarily become more pro-union or more friendly around lower economic class proposals that would boost people standing in society. And I think it'll be a question then of how the economy right now, I think, is behind
Republicans and behind some of that messaging, but how do they build a long-term coalition around that? We saw in 2016, for instance, Trump's focus on immigration did repel a lot of Latino voters, even though immigration is rarely their top issue. It's the economy, like most voters, right? But it's still that language and rhetoric alienated a lot of Latino voters. And you could see that if the Republican Party doesn't move away from some of the ways in which it talks about immigration, particularly in targeting
Latino Americans, that could be a problem for them moving forward. And then I think too, you know, we kind of say in blanket terms, non-white versus white. I think it really is what we're seeing though among like Latino voters. I think there's some evidence that you're also seeing among Asian American voters, a shift towards Republicans. There's a lot less polling on that. It's very hard to poll different groups in that vein.
It's just very unclear to me because at the same time this is happening, you have someone like John Fetterman running in Pennsylvania for Democrats, right, for the Senate there, who is pitching kind of a working class message. And I don't think the two parties have
have fully kind of grappled out who is going to ultimately own that message. I think the Democrats at this point still have more like infrastructure in place to have that message work than Republicans. But, you know, if more working class voters shift towards Republicans, I think that leans in their favor. But I think it's a muddy message right now and neither party is really fully focused on those voters.
Yeah, I think that the tension in the Democratic coalition that is sort of evident in the contrast between a like a Tim Ryan or a Fetterman and a Buttigieg or a Conor Lamb is is really interesting. And in this sort of split between populism and a sort of technocratic liberalism that I think you sort of see playing out the voter level, it's sort of harder to see that.
clean split playing out in terms of the way politicians are behaving. It's not like you see Democratic politicians leaning in to free trade yet, right? You could imagine some world where now the Republicans have taken the anti-immigration and anti-trade half of the ledger that Democrats would really lean forcefully into being pro-immigration, being pro-trade, sort of clearly representing the other half of the spectrum.
And they're not doing that yet. And part of the reason is because they continue to be dependent on white working class voters in the Midwest who have outsized influence in the battleground states and the electoral college. And those voters are clearly not aligned with sort of the college educated white cosmopolitan worldview. But over the longer run, as demographic trends continue, you could come closer to a breaking point there.
where Democrats sort of more forcefully own their own caricature and become the sort of globalist party that they're accused of being. The Republicans, on the other hand, have their own version of that in terms of like whether they're going to keep embracing large tax cuts for corporations and to what extent their sort of business agenda is inconsistent with the populist agenda.
My own view is that it's not really. I mean, if you look historically to the 19th century, it's sort of the pre-industrial era in some ways, oddly enough. It's interesting that that would be the analogy today, but we are watching the industrial era now sort of fade after all, right? Unionization is dropping, manufacturing is dropping. That clash between labor and capital is no longer the defining political fault line of our politics. And so...
It's interesting that back in the days before all of that existed, that it was common for populism to be linked to smaller government. Jacksonian Democrats, for instance, where people often compared Jackson and Donald Trump as being sort of analogous political figures, even though Jackson was a party of small government and wasn't arguing for welfare handouts or anything like that. It was a different era when you could attract working class voters in a different way.
And I think that there's something to the idea that you can still be a populist without, while still being for small government and not supporting a large welfare state.
So we've gone pretty broad and we've cast forward quite a bit here. I want to bring us back to sort of the most immediate political question at hand, which is perhaps the midterms. On this theme, though, traditionally, we think of a midterm electorate as being older, whiter and more inclined to have a college degree than the electorate in a general presidential election.
Do these trends suggest then that Democrats will better be able to stem a backlash against Biden and the economy and the direction of the country?
than they would have with their electorate 15 years ago, their coalition 15 years ago? I think the short answer to that is almost unequivocally yes. And you can see in the fundraising numbers right now that even at this tough moment for Democrats, that the people who are most engaged in American politics right now, that cream of the crop, you know, includes who are willing to donate their dollars to political candidates, includes plenty of Democrats.
In our own likely voter model, you know, the Democrats are only losing about two points compared to Republicans at the moment. And that is in part a reflection of a reversal of the relationship between partisanship and likelihood of voting. Back in 2016, when we were building turnout models, Republicans led among the likeliest voters and Democrats had a wide lead, 20, 30 points among people who we thought were unlikely to vote. That's the opposite in our most recent poll. In fact,
It's part of the reason why Joe Biden has lower approval rating in our poll than other surveys. Among people who voted in both the 2018 election and have voted in a primary, the very likeliest voters in our view, Joe Biden's approval rating is 41%. Among voters who haven't voted in any recent election, his approval rating is in the low 20s.
So the Democrats have, there is an underlying pattern at the moment where the most engaged voters are relatively likely to be Democrats. What cuts against that, though, is that within each of those groups, among high turnout voters, among low turnout voters, I would still think that the Republicans are likelier to vote than Democrats.
because there is unfavorable national political environment. And I would guess that will outweigh the demographic advantages among white voters that we're talking about here. And so I would still expect the Republicans to have a turnout edge. But, you know, back in 2014, there were some estimates that say the Democrats had like a seven point disadvantage due to turnout in that midterm election nationwide. I don't know if that's true or not. I haven't tried to calculate it myself, but I would be very surprised if it was at quite that level in 2022, given both the high level of participation that we expect and
and this reversal in the underlying relationship between turnout and partisanship.
It is interesting right now, given where we are in the cycle, that Democrats still have like a slight advantage in the generic ballot polling, especially given where Biden's approval rating is. The two factors are not necessarily related. If you're trying to figure out how people will vote in the midterm, definitely look at the generic ballot poll over Biden's approval because, you know, you can still disapprove of the president, be a Democrat.
I want Democrats to control Congress. I think, though, while some of the coalitional shift, as Nate is speaking to, helps Democrats in the sense that, you know, white college educated voters, highly engaged, want to turn out. It is a small portion, though, of Democrats base. And if they can't motivate other components of that base to turn out.
I think that could be a real problem for Democrats here in the midterms. And I think the other thing I've learned now from the 2018 midterms and 2020 in particular is that it seems like we're done with the era of low turnout elections. Maybe I'll be proven wrong here in 2022. But from that kind of starting point, I'm a little skeptical that either side will have low turnout just because we have not seen that in previous elections here. One thing that helps the Democrats a little bit
in the short term is that a lot of the most competitive races, not all of them, but a lot of them are in disproportionately white districts or states. And that will not in any way insulate Democrats from low turnout among Black or Latino voters, but it does slightly mitigate the effect of it compared to our national poll.
for example. So you're talking like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, because obviously there are other states where there are competitive Senate elections like Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, where you would expect that to not be the case, right? Definitely. Even in those states like Arizona is about as white as the nation as a whole. So if we're talking about a national, just when the baseline is the national political survey, I think that in a lot of the states,
and also in competitive districts, that this story could be a little bit different. But that's not to say that this problem doesn't exist. It just slightly mitigates it in certain geographic areas. Nate, what did you make about this split between Biden's approval and the
the generic ballot polling. And as a reminder, generic ballot polling is essentially when pollsters just ask folks, do you plan on voting for a Republican or Democrat for Congress? And that's the number we pay the most attention to in trying to cast forward how the midterms might go. But we also usually pay a good deal of attention to the presidential approval rating because historically it is pretty indicative of how many seats a party might lose at the midterms.
So to reiterate, in this poll, Biden's approval rating is at 33%, whereas support for Democratic control of Congress is at 41% compared to support for Republican control at 40%. That changes slightly when you put a likely voter model on those numbers to Republicans having a one point advantage instead of Democrats. But still, that's much closer than, you know, if you just told me Biden's approval rating in this poll is 33%, what do you expect the generic ballot polling to be?
I would maybe guess something more like, I don't know, a five point spread or maybe more. Yeah. So like Sarah said, you can be a Democrat, not a roof of Biden. And quite frankly, in this poll, Biden's approval rating amongst Democrats is at 70%. So it seems like there are lots of Democrats who don't approve of Biden's job performance and still want Democrats to control the House or the Senate or what have you. Is that the whole story? Like, is there any is there more to it than that?
Yeah, I think that one challenge that Democrats have in this poll is who's undecided. And alternately, if you want to if you want to think of it that way, who is decided in our poll, only 7% of white voters with a college degree are undecided.
The rest of the electorate, it's more than 20 percent undecided. So, you know, we talk about white college graduates being a potential turnout advantage for Democrats, but they're also just more plugged in politically. They are likelier to have an opinion at this point about who should control Congress. I should note that our generic ballot question is asking people whether they prefer Democrats or Republicans.
to control Congress. And many people haven't even begun to think about that yet. Joe Biden's approval rating among the undecided voters is like 23% if my memory is right. And that's a group that's overwhelmingly working class. So, you know, if voters aren't beginning to think about the midterm election yet in nationalized terms, except those highly educated people who right now are pretty democratic, I think it's easy to see why right now that generic ballot question might start out looking pretty good for them, but that could potentially change very quickly.
once the midterm race really gets underway. And also, I mean, one thing we did see post-Jobs is there was a shift in these generic ballot polls towards Democrats on average. And I think it's an open question of how much that shift continues. I mean, it's a different issue, but in the
The polling we've been doing with Ipsos, we've already seen a dip in terms of the number of Americans who say that gun violence and crime is important to them. Post, you know, we went out to the field a few days after Evalde, and you saw a huge spike in that. And if anything, too, when you look historically at this poll, it gets worse for the party in the White House as time goes on.
And so I think you can expect, presumably, I mean, I think it's an important point to what Nate said at the very outset, where there are certain factors happening in our politics right now that make it really hard to predict things as normal, right? But using the historical precedent, you should expect like Republicans to gain a few points.
But it might not be a red wave. I think that's kind of what we've been talking about internally. Very early in the 2018 midterms, you saw a huge advantage for Democrats on the generic ballot. You're not seeing that for Republicans this year. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see whether all of these new issues...
I knew is the wrong word for it, but resurgent issues, abortion and guns remain the center of national attention for the rest of the campaign. But I think that as long as they do remain a major focal point, that feels like it creates a bit of a floor for Democrats. It's easy to imagine the Democrat who would ordinarily stay home, who feels motivated when –
abortion rights and democracy feel like they're at stake. It's easy to imagine the moderate Republican who voted for Biden, who would really prefer to be voting for Romney Republicans all the time,
but really has to think twice when the Republican nominee supports a ban on abortion and thinks that Donald Trump is the legitimate winner of the election. A lot of the factors that you would ordinarily expect to be pushing towards the Republicans now have, at least for the moment, like an important countervailing force that we don't usually have
in the historic record. And the historic record is very clear on what we should expect to happen this November. And it is my instinct, like Sarah's, that that will prevail in the end. But there are things about this moment that are different. And whether that adds up to the whole this time will end up being different in terms of the electoral outcome is a totally separate question. It's usually not different after all. But if it did, if it was the day after the election and it was different,
We would not struggle to tell the story. We could all write what that article is going to say. And so when it's that easy to come up with why we could distinguish this moment, you know, at least have to be open to the possibility that it will prove to be maybe only slightly different. Maybe it just means that the Democrats can stay competitive in the Senate and they only lose 15 House seats or something. I don't expect the Democrats to actually win this election in some sense. But could it be enough to prevent the wave that we would expect? That seems possible to me.
You know, it's, of course, important to remember that in the same way that the issue environment changed relatively rapidly and we ended up with a good number of high propensity voters saying that they were concerned about abortion and gun control and issues surrounding democracy.
The issue of environment can change again, you know, like just last fall, of course, during the Virginia gubernatorial election, everyone was talking about critical race theory. In this poll, only 4% of voters combined, you found, said that education, crime, or immigration was the most important issue facing the country. I don't think people would have guessed that last fall. I think they would have guessed that Republicans would have been able to make those issues more
salient in an enduring way until the midterms. Obviously, the Dobbs decision and Uvalde and other mass shootings and the January 6th committee has changed all that. But as you're all suggesting, things can change again. And
Of course, Dobbs is different. It's like a huge win for the party that's quote-unquote out of power. So I guess we'll just have to see and continue tracking this stuff. Let's talk a little bit about the potential 2024 matchups that you dug into in this polling and found some interesting information.
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Looking ahead to 2024, you found that a majority of Democrats, 64%, don't want Biden to run again. And the leading reasons were age and job performance, not really his politics per se. In this polling, do we have some kind... Well, first of all, is that ever surprising? And second of all, perhaps the more interesting question, do we have any indication of what kind of candidate Democrats do want?
I did think it was surprising. I didn't know what to expect, but I expected higher than whatever the number in the 20s that Biden got was. But we know we don't have a very good idea of what Canada Democrats prefer. I'd argue that the 2020 primaries may still be our best indication of where Democrats are at from an ideological standpoint.
or from an electability versus policy preference standpoint. And we saw a very divided and fractured field in 2020. So I think Democrats probably would split deeply again, whether they want someone more who's a Democratic socialist or another neoliberal or...
more mainstream Democrat. I think all those sort of voters have important constituencies in the party. And I think that gives it obviously gives Biden a very real chance to prevail, even in a contested primary, because it's going to be difficult to unify the opposition unless you're a very strong candidate. And that, you know, although we didn't ask about it, my view is that there is no obvious person. Of course, you did ask about it in the Republican Party, which we we we will talk about. Sarah,
I'm curious what you thought of this, but like in response to what Nate said about the 2020 primary, you know, to what do you attribute this almost like whiplash where Biden was consistently the most popular Democrat in the 2020 primary, but voters have now turned on him pretty decisively. Well,
Biden was the most consistent. I was actually going to talk about this earlier, that, you know, we look at early primary polls. So a year out. So starting in 2019, we were looking at the field and building it out as it became an unwieldy field of 20 plus candidates. And you're right that Biden was always leading, but it wasn't a super overwhelming lead. Right. So that left opportunities then for someone like Harris to have a moment.
for someone like Warren, for someone like Sanders. He was always the frontrunner in the early primary polls that we had, but it was never an overwhelming frontrunner. He was the consensus candidate, right? And I think, you know, we'd done a piece earlier that was looking at how unusual is it that so many people don't want Biden to run again. And what we found is previous polls for presidents, whether it's Reagan, Clinton,
have found that Americans don't want that president to run again. Generally speaking, though, it hasn't been as high as the numbers for Biden, particularly among members of his own party. And I think that's what's really staggering there. I think that where we see the dilemma for Democrats is when you do the head-to-head Biden-Trump, Biden still prevails. Granted, his name
They were saying they didn't ask about other Democrats, but we have seen in other polls, you know, Harris does weaker against Trump, Buttigieg does weaker against Trump. And I think that's kind of the real dilemma that Democrats have, this idea that Biden's too old, he shouldn't be president, but who should be president instead? And I think there's an interesting argument that Democrats, similar to Republicans, are kind of moving in this direction in vain of wanting more of a fighter candidate. I think you see that with candidacies like Fetterman,
But I don't know how much of that appeal resonates with the rest of the Democratic base, because I think one thing we lose sight of oftentimes is that when you look at the ideologies of the party, yes, a lot of Republicans, they only identify as conservative. There's not a huge moderate contingency. And yes, you know, very liberal and somewhat liberal are big factions of the Democratic base, but so are
moderate voters. And I think that kind of inevitably brings up the tensions then of who's going to be able to appeal to all the different sections of the Democratic base. And if someone only ran that appeal to college-educated white voters, I don't know if that would be a winning coalition for Democrats. Yeah, it is not easy to come up with a candidate who is positioned to beat Biden if Biden ran, who has the ability to appeal broadly throughout the Democratic Party, who
has the name recognition and fundraising ability to make up for the likelihood that many party elites are going to stay on Biden's side and who would be a credible candidate in the general election. There just aren't many people who you can come up with who fit that bill. It's easy to come up with people who could win if Biden doesn't run, but I think it's very difficult to come up with the people who have a chance to be competitive against him if he seeks re-election. There's no Ted Kennedy against Carter in 1986.
Sarah, you mentioned different factions of the Democratic Party. And speaking of those different factions and different sort of values and goals, one finding in the Times-Siena poll that got a good amount of play was that 94% of Democrats under the age of 30 wanted a nominee who isn't Biden. Now, of
Of course, you already mentioned this, Nate, but in polls, the more you dig into small populations and the crosstabs, the greater the margin of error is. And the sample of young Democrats, I think it was like 56 people. And so I think...
we would probably caution against reading too much into that 94% number. First of all, do you agree with that? Like, would you caution against reading too much into that? Or do you think that that's probably fairly representative? I would definitely caution against reading too far into it. I mean, we're talking about an unbalanced sample of 50 people. It's not weighted within that subgroup. I mean, whether, I can't tell you with any confidence whether those 50 people are representative of all young people. But, you know, when you're at 94, there's a lot of room to
and still have fundamentally the same basic finding. Yeah, and I think the one thing working in the Times' favor is that other polls have also shown a real problem for Biden among young voters as well. And he got pummeled in two in 2020 among the group, so in the Democratic primary. I think that part of the reason that this has gotten so much attention both in the Times poll and in other polls is because we generally think of young people as dissidents
disproportionately supporting the democratic party as being like a key portion of the obama coalition that the democratic party has you know been wanting to recreate for some time
Why is Biden performing so poorly with not just young people, but also young people who identify with the Democratic Party? Why should he be performing well among young people who are Democrats right now? I mean, I'm serious. I mean, he's if we just take their stated concerns in the poll, they're they're concerned about his his age, his competence, his performance as president.
Some of them are progressive, too. And, you know, we look at the overall situation in the country right now where the core promise of the Biden presidency in terms of like unity hasn't happened. The economy is not in a good position. The president's agenda is stalled in Congress and it's not as ambitious as they would like anyway. I mean, it's and he has never been their favorite. You know, I think that you can make a case that maybe someone should just be sympathetic to him as a matter of
him being an incumbent president, but he was never the favorite of this group. And I would almost put around, why would you expect Biden to have more support? Well, I think the expectation hinges on the idea that this was his best group in the general. But I think that is a sharp point that it was not true in the primary. And I think it does speak to your point, though, overall of what can they point to to be happy
I think there was a lot of fanfare when Biden was first elected and then the surprise, to be quite honest, of Democrats winning both seats in Georgia and then having a trifecta, but then Democrats not really acting on a lot of the stated ambitions they had going into the presidency.
Just as a brainstorming exercise, what is if you were to try and tell a young Democrat to be to be happy with him? I mean, what would be your pitch? It's it's not easy to come up with right now. I think it's a useful exercise. Change is slow. Think how bad the alternative could be. Yeah.
young Democrat. Yeah, okay, yeah. But that's not a very good message. I get it. But they probably like the Democratic alternatives more, you know, as the Democratic primary in 2020 indicates. But it seems like sort of the young progressive vision of, like, spend a lot of money and don't even necessarily worry about the deficit was the strategy that was employed. And it got us the tightest labor market in most people's memory. And so people who are graduating from college are getting jobs. I mean, they might be annoyed about inflation, but...
It's way easier to get a job today than it was when I graduated from college in 2012. So, you know, to a certain extent, the progressive part of the party got what it wanted, which was lots and lots of spending. It got some of that under Trump's presidency because obviously, you know, the provisions for stimulus spending and
and PPP and all of that stuff were pulled up in the House by House Democrats, even though Trump was president. But in a way, they got what they wanted. I don't think that they think they got what they wanted. I mean, you can try and make that pitch, but what they wanted was the huge reconciliation bill that reflected this ambitious, idealistic vision of, you know, a government that did more to help people across almost every dimension of life from child care to
to expanded Medicare benefits. - But do you really think that's why young people are unhappy? - No, but if you're talking about whether they got what they wanted, I think it's relevant. - Yeah, I mean, so that's why young college educated progressive people might be sort of disappointed, but obviously most young people aren't those things. Why are the rest of young people unhappy? Just inflation and general, you know, the guy's old, stuff like that?
I think it goes beyond that. I mean, there's several arguments you could make about our politics and what's the most essential, whether it's where you live, rural-urban splits, whether it's you went to college or not. I also think, though, generational divides. Age is a really big factor in our politics. We saw this in the 2016 primary on the Democratic side.
side between Clinton and Sanders. You saw it again in 2020 with again, Sanders coalition was primarily driven by younger voters. As Nate pointed out, younger voters at that stage in the election process were Biden's weakest link, right?
But I think more so than that just being isolated to Biden, then there is this sense of what are Democratic politicians actually doing in Congress? I'm a younger person in my lifetime. Access to abortion, or at least the right to abortion, was taken for granted. Now that's taken away.
way? What are Democrats doing to fight back against that? Right. Like climate change, I think is a huge issue predominantly among younger voters. Some of these social issues, you just see time and again, really big age gaps. And so I think when action doesn't happen on those issues as fast as you would like, that can really breed strong dissatisfaction and disillusionment with the party as well.
All right. So as you mentioned, you didn't pull alternatives for Biden, but you did pull alternatives for Trump. And what you found in a hypothetical 2024 Republican presidential primary is that 49% of likely primary voter Republican primary voters support Trump, 25% support Ron DeSantis, followed by Ted Cruz, Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, who are all in the single digits.
That's about in the range of other national polling that we've seen. And in The Times analysis, I'm sure a lot of people saw sort of leading The Times last week. The headline was like half of GOP voters are ready to leave Trump behind.
He still leads the field, of course, by 24 points. So help us sort of put that in context. Like, is this bad news for Trump or is this decent news for Trump? I mean, it depends on your expectations. And I think that for Trump, given the level of dominance he's had over the Republican Party,
including convincing the majority of Republican voters and elected officials to go along with a stolen election story that goes against all of the evidence, that it is, to me, surprising that he is as vulnerable as he seems to be in a primary. To me, 49-26, if I'm remembering the numbers right, that feels like Clinton-Obama 08 at the outset more than it feels like Clinton-Sanders at the outset, let alone a...
candidate who's on track to win without a contested primary. If your benchmark here is here's a guy who's commanded total unity from his party to this point, then I think these are surprisingly disappointing numbers. By basically any other measure, they're pretty good. He's still the favorite to, you know, win and
There's no point in taking that away from him or something like that. But I think that if you are accustomed to seeing someone who, again, I use the word dominance, who exercises dominance over his party, who has been able to stifle opposition even when it has been more than it deserved, that the weakness is noteworthy. So I think I would push back on that. You're right that there has been an attrition, even among Republican voters,
in regards to Trump. But when I think about this kind of historically for what the field has looked like and what that means for primary polls results, Trump should win. He's roughly kind of where Biden was going into the first half of 2019. He's actually above Biden. We had Biden at 31.6%.
But then it was a similar situation where no other candidate was super close. And yes, like DeSantis is not that far off. But is DeSantis more of a coalitional candidate than Trump? You know, I don't know. Are they competing for the same voters? What do the different like coalition maneuverings look like among the Republican Party members?
I think it's telling that this far out, he's still the frontrunner. We'll see as time goes on where we are in 2023. But at this point, it does look like his primary, his nomination. Yeah, I agree with all that. The only thing I'd say on the framing point is that Donald Trump is a former president. And I don't think that the comparison between him and most other primaries is necessarily the salient one. We don't have very many cases of people returning for
you know, to try and run for a third presidential run in recent memory. I mean, I guess,
I honestly can't remember offhand whether there's any example in the modern polling data of having too many, I don't know, were people asking about whether George H.W. Bush should run again in 96, maybe? I doubt anyone was asking about Carter running again in 84. Maybe it's in there somewhere. But I think that with that context in mind, that he basically won the Republican nomination in an uncontested fashion in 2020, and that he has retained support
from his party through so many deeply challenging moments that this is a sign of weakness in the data that has not always existed for this person. This is all speculative at this point. We'll see what kind of campaign DeSantis runs. I actually think he is fairly well positioned to run a campaign that can unify all parties.
of the major constituencies against Trump. That's partly because Trump has alienated the constituency that DeSantis is weakest among, you know, sort of never-Trumper type anti-pro-democracy people who are opposed to Trump's conduct and his January 6th stuff and think he violates the law and so on. That group of people, I think, is going to vote against Trump no matter what.
But DeSantis also has the ability, I think, to speak to people on the right who potentially in a primary could wind up thinking that DeSantis' closer came to them on a lot of issues. I can imagine DeSantis critiquing Donald Trump for bringing Anthony Fauci into everyone's lives. I can imagine him complaining that he sent out the $2,000 stimulus checks that...
are responsible for inflation. I can imagine DeSantis saying, you didn't get the wall done. I can imagine DeSantis saying, I won in Florida by more than you did. So, and I would, I would win this time. So I think he has the ability and he has this proven record from a conservative standpoint of, you know, taking on political correctness and liberals in the state and being a fighter and so on. So I can see him managing to hold,
dissent against Trump on both his left and his right that, at least in theory, on paper, gives him interesting potential down the line. In sort of a similar way, I go back to Barack Obama. Obviously, DeSantis and Obama are very different political figures. But Obama also had some of that ability in that he could at once appeal to the sort of moderates who thought Hillary Clinton just had too much baggage. Obama said he was going to be bipartisan and so on, while on the other end of the spectrum, he was anti-war and could appeal to some people who were critical on her left. And I think that DeSantis has some of those features, even if the specifics are vastly different than they were.
But is he enough of a change or just repackaged? The question. I mean, he's young. He's got a young family. He is young. I mean, that would be quite a dynamic on the stage. Honestly, at this point, anyone who's like below 60 feels like a change candidate by dint of just their age. Like, I don't know, maybe that's not actually true in the polling, but...
I think DeSantis will feel like a big change candidate depending on what issues are sailing. I think that, again, we went back to this at the beginning of the conversation with Gail and was pointing out that issues like immigration and crime and education have not been at the top of the ledger. But if in 2024, the issues, those are the issues. I think it's very easy to see DeSantis being the change candidate if that's what the major dimensions of conversation are about.
So there are a lot of questions that I wrote down while reading through all this polling that we're not going to get to. So I will save them for the next round of midterm polling that you do. Before I let you go, though, Nate, I do want to get a little wonky because this is your first round of midterm polling.
The last time you did a big round of polling like this was right before the 2020 election. Of course, there was significant polling error in 2020. And the polling community, us at FiveThirtyEight, were concerned about designing surveys that accurately reflect what Americans think, because in a democracy, that's super important. And I know that this is something that you think a lot about. What measures did you take, you know, over the past year and a half or so to
make sure that your surveys are accurately reflecting American public opinion? First, let me just say that I'm glad you asked that. And I'm surprised that it's not the first question and that we managed to conduct these surveys without getting any real pushback. It literally was my second question, but we dove into the coalition. I'm glad to hear that. I do feel like we're going into this cycle and people are just, you know, sort of back to uncritically taking polling averages. I mean, to look at this, we're talking about the Senate. Look,
looking pretty good for Democrats. And it's like, wow, where have I seen good polling for Democrats in Ohio and Wisconsin before? And, you know, I'm just surprised that we're that people are as credulous as they seem to be. When you start seeing state polls of Democrats leading in Ohio and Wisconsin, this national political environment, how can the number one theory not be this is a story we have seen before where state polls were
are failing to represent white working class voters. So I remain very concerned about this. I guess the short answer to your question in terms of what we're doing differently is still not much. We're not doing very much differently. There are lots of things that I am considering doing, and I wanted to see how it played out within this cycle. We have a new response environment. Joe Biden's really unpopular. Take something like recalled 2020 vote choice, whether you voted for Biden or Trump in the last election. We've never asked that question before. I didn't know what kind of answers we were going to get
There are other variables that we've considered adding like primary vote choice and so on that I think that we just need to see on this cycle's worth of data to see what works before we implement them. I will say that the sort of measures I was looking at to try and evaluate whether 2022 polling felt like 2020 was
or 2018 or 2016, checked out pretty well. I mean, one simple measure that I have been looking at is whether white Democrats or white Republicans were likely to respond to our surveys. You may recall that in October 2019, we did some polling that showed Biden leading Trump while Trump led Warren and Sanders
in the six battleground states. They're really the only unbiased and accurate polls that we managed to conduct in the 2020 cycle. Even though they were a year ahead of the election, they came within a point of the final result for Biden-Trump.
When we conducted those surveys, white Democrats were somewhat likely to respond to the poll than white Republicans. They were 6% likelier, if my memory is right. In fall of 2020, that number had swelled to over 25%. So now we weighed on partisanship, so we still had the right number of white Democrats and white Republicans, but that may betray the
that there was this deeper non-response bias among Trump voters and that Trump voters were simply more likely, less likely to respond or Biden voters more likely to respond if you want to put it that way. That as a consequence, there were more Democrats, but even among the Democrats we were got, there were too many Biden people. And even among the Republicans we were got, there were too many Biden people and so on. In this poll, white Republicans were one percentage point, likelier to respond to the survey than white Democrats.
I think that doesn't prove that there's no non-response bias in the poll, but it does tell me that the non-response environment, the response environment is very different than it was two years ago. And, you know, as a historical matter, we know that polling is not always as biased as it was in the last cycle. That example from 2019 to 2020 is one example. If you had used 2016 to predict the poll error in 2018, you would have had a problem. If you used 2012 to predict 2014, you would have had a problem. So I think that
With that in mind, that there's no reason to assume that the polling is terribly biased at this point. And there are some, I have some tentative evidence that the environment is more conducive to accurate polling than it was two years ago. That said,
I see zero reason to assume that some of the underlying biases are different. I would assume that I'm deeply concerned about running a state poll in Wisconsin or Ohio this cycle. I mean, I don't want to do that personally. You're going to do it though, I assume, right? We have some interesting plans. I can't divulge those plans. Okay.
Oh, come on. Break your news right here on the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I can't do that because I don't know that I can follow through on them quite yet. If we poll Wisconsin, we're not going to run a credulous poll of Wisconsin where we declare that Ron Johnson is down five points the day before the election. I mean, if we do a poll of Wisconsin that shows the Democrat ahead, I just I cannot write. I don't see how we could write a straight story that's like, oh,
Democrats are going to win Wisconsin tomorrow. I mean, maybe they will, but I've seen enough there. So what can you tell us about your plans going forward between now and the midterms in terms of what kinds of questions you want to prod, what places you know you'll be polling or what districts you know you'll be polling? We don't have to make any of those decisions yet. So we haven't made any of those decisions. We...
I can't speak to how other organizations make these decisions, but we generally reserve call center hours, and then we decide what we'll do with them closer to the election. I can make some reasonable guesses that I'm pretty sure we're going to want to pull Georgia and Pennsylvania, but...
Will we want to pull some House districts or not? I mean, that'll depend on what the generic ballot says. Do we decide that actually the primary season is heating up really early and maybe we ought to pull Nevada and New Hampshire, which have competitive Senate races and can do some early 2024 primary testing? Maybe those become more important than North Carolina and Wisconsin. I just, you know, those, we don't have to make those decisions yet. And so we haven't. In terms of just things that you're curious about, and Sarah, obviously we're getting ready to do more polling with Ipsos as well. Like,
Given all this data that we have as something of a starting point for understanding the country heading into the midterms, like what are you most curious about in terms of where the trend line goes next? What kinds of questions you might like to continue asking, not even where you're going to pull, but the kinds of questions you want to hear Americans answer?
I'm very curious about class polarization and the various theories for why the demographic trends are what they are. There are a lot of different theories out there for why white working class and working class non-white voters are trending towards the Republicans. I think we should try and put them to the test as much as we can. I think it's a good fit for us. We do surveys off of voter registration files. It gives us the ability to understand people who are registered Democrats and maybe don't identify with the party anymore. I think it gives us a
Our surveys have always been more politically focused because they're not of the full adult population. So I think that's a really fun challenge that we should try and probe out a few times. As we get closer to the election, I think the democracy questions are going to be very salient, whether people trust the outcome, whether in some of these secret
if we do state polling in some of the races where there are stop-the-steal types seeking a secretary of state's office or the governor's race, how those attitudes are shaking down, shaking out, and whether they have any effect on vote choice, particularly among people who backed Biden last time, but maybe would otherwise be interested in a Republican candidate. That's really interesting to me. Not necessarily because I...
I think it's like a politically central question in terms of like the horse race, but because of just the stakes for democracy in our system of government. Yeah. No, I mean, I think that's a, Nate hit on the big ones there. I think I would add to that what we were talking about earlier around this idea of could this midterm election kind of challenge some of the conventional wisdom around midterms being bad for the presidency?
party. My underlying assumption is it will be business as normal, but I think going into it, we should interrogate that more and look to see where there are cracks. All right. Well, we will absolutely do that. And Nate, we hope you'll come back on and talk to us the next time you get a big round of polling data. But for now, thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks for having me. It was fun. And thank you, Sarah, as usual. My name is Galen Druk. Tony Chow is in the virtual control room. Chadwick Matlin is our editorial director. Anthony Luciani is on sound editing. 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'll see you soon. ♪
