Are Democrats Losing Maine?

Still Counting

The hosts analyze recent midterm polling trends, highlighting a significant Democratic advantage in the House and Senate according to Nate S

Key takeaways

• Nate Silver's Flipper model currently gives Democrats a 73% chance of winning the Senate and a 93% chance for the House.
• In Maine, polling shows an outlier where Senator Susan Collins leads Troy Jackson, despite broader trends suggesting a tighter race.

Main topics

• Midterm election forecasting
• Maine Senate race dynamics

Notable quotes

Maine is very sui generis.

Conclusion

The episode demonstrates that while national trends show a Democratic

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) Yeah, look, I think Maine is very sui generis. How the fuck do you say that? Speaker 5 (0:04) That's correct. Speaker 4 (0:05) Okay. I Speaker 5 (0:05) don't think something can be very sui generis. It is. Speaker 4 (0:07) I think it Speaker 5 (0:07) just has to Speaker 4 (0:08) be Speaker 5 (0:08) sui generis. Speaker 4 (0:09) Okay, thanks, Grammarly Galen. Speaker 4 (0:15) Welcome to Still Counting. I'm Galen Druk. I'm Speaker 5 (0:17) Claire Malone. Speaker 4 (0:18) I'm Nate Silver, the University of Chicago. Do you watch the NFL ever where players give their affiliation? Oh, Speaker 5 (0:24) that's a good one. That's embarrassing. We're not going to do that. Speaker 6 (0:27) You're embarrassed of Johns Hopkins? I Speaker 5 (0:29) mean, I'm not embarrassed. I'm embarrassed to say where I went to college, not that I went to college. Galen Druk. Speaker 6 (0:34) Galen Druk. Johns Hopkins. Okay, Speaker 5 (0:38) that I have to do for you. Claire Malone, Georgetown. Booyah. Speaker 6 (0:43) I can sing the whole Georgetown fight song. Speaker 5 (0:45) We'll spare our listeners. Okay. Speaker 6 (0:47) On today's show, the latest midterms polling and forecast updates, which means new dolphin sounds to make, Nate. And then we're going to home in on two states, Maine, where Susan Collins, heard of her, may actually have the upper hand, according to the most recent Times-Siena poll. And Ohio, a red state that may return Democrat Sherrod Brown back to the Senate. Assuming people realize that he is not the current incumbent. I Speaker 4 (1:12) would help him, though, probably. Right. We'll Speaker 6 (1:13) save that for the segment. OK. OK. We'll also get into the discourse surrounding Alaska Senate candidate Mary Peltola. Speaker 5 (1:20) I mean, that's going to be a good one. People have to stick around for that. We're putting it on the end. Dylan Drew, Speaker 6 (1:23) Peltola head, will be reporting for duty. We'll talk about the report of her alleged mistreatment of staffers. Speaker 3 (1:30) OK. But first, let's start by checking in on the big picture horse race for the Speaker 6 (1:34) House and the Senate. Speaker 3 (1:35) We Speaker 5 (1:36) go to Flipper. Speaker 6 (1:37) The fourth. Should Speaker 5 (1:39) I try it once? That's maybe the first and only time I will be doing that. Speaker 6 (1:43) For those just joining us, Flipper is Nate's election model. And Flipper right now gives Democrats a roughly 73 percent chance of winning the Senate. Hillary Speaker 4 (1:51) Clinton's own. She was like 71 percent, I think, on election night. Tough times. Speaker 6 (1:58) Pause for Hillary Clinton. That's up for about 67 percent last week. The forecast currently gives Democrats almost a 93 percent chance of taking the House. So that's a lot. You guys, it seems like Flipper heard last week's bull case for the Democrats and it liked it. Nate, what's driving the model up for them? I Speaker 4 (2:19) mean, we've seen just. The number going up for Democrats in terms of the generic ballot in particular, to a slightly lesser extent, the state polls, you know, look, my thesis is that same as last week, gas costs 450 a gallon. I think it's part of it. Part of it is that when polls are switching over to likely voter polls, they're finding a Democratic enthusiasm and turnout advantage. Part of it might be just the bottom falling out from Trump. I mean, as that Democratic generic ballot number goes up, then Trump's approval rating is now lower than it was. after January 6th when he was impeached. I didn't realize that. No, it's as low as it's ever been. Let's keep in mind, too, Trump is 80 years old. He's in his second term. People are positioning themselves for the 2028 election already, and people are tired of this. There's been a lot of Trump. You've seen, for example, Republican podcasts aren't mentioning Trump as much. I get bored by all the fucking Trump crap on all the... Democratic newsletters that I subscribe to, right? But... 10 Speaker 6 (3:23) years of Trump and we're already sick of him? Is that... Speaker 4 (3:25) Well, I think people are fatigued by it, right? And I think his gimmicks, you know, now we're renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America and artificial intelligence to super intelligence and... Do Speaker 6 (3:36) you think the... I mean, just curious if you think the week of news last week where it's kind of like some of the pettier aspects of Trump, like the Kennedy Center and saying he's going to, like, knock it down and... No, Speaker 4 (3:48) I think that's grist for Heather Cox Richardson clickbait, right? Like, I think the people who care about buildings and stuff in Washington, D.C. are a group that's going to vote 99.9 % Democratic anyway. But I think it's more like when these core promises are failing, when gas is really expensive, when we're at war in the Middle East, exactly the kind of war he said he would avoid or promised to avoid, his schtick. just seems tired and kind of played out, right? The culture wars kind of work better when he's like, well, Democrats say this and that about me, but the economy is good and you have a job and you have more money in your paycheck and stuff is cheap. And like, it makes all of the cultural shit seem silly. And the other thing too, I've noticed is like, there has not been a lot of focus on, maybe Mary Paltola aside, unlike Democrats foibles as much. I mean, I don't think the midterm convention in Dallas mattered very much, but it was funny that that was like the kind of moment when... Democrats to this takeoff in the polls and, you know, to center the election around him. Speaker 6 (4:56) Yeah. Galen, did you see the news that Ken Paxton, there's, I think, maybe leaked audio that Ken Paxton was telling a group of people that Trump's midterms convention had hurt him? Speaker 5 (5:04) Might not have been helpful. I mean, that's not really Ken Paxton's issue in Texas. I think it's like a decade of being viewed as ultimately corrupt, even by his own party, having been impeached by his fellow Republicans. Nate said something early on there that I think is worth talking about, which is the spread between what we're seeing in registered voter polls versus likely voter polls. There was a YouGov Economist poll out yesterday that showed Democrats leading by eight points amongst registered voters and 15 points amongst likely voters. I do think we're getting into territory here where people are going to worry about. polling error. I think expectations are being set incredibly high. We might be reaching the point where if Democrats win the national popular vote in the House by eight or nine points, Democrats could be ultimately disappointed by that. And look, likely voter screens are as much art as they are science. Pollsters have to make assumptions about who is going to show up based on how you answer the question, are you likely to vote, some demographic information, and some voter history information. And that can be tricky. I think in a midterm, there's less of a risk of sort of missing out on less engaged voters because less engaged voters are just less likely. People who are less likely to answer polls are also less likely to vote in a midterm. So some of the same issues that plague general election polling might not plague it this time around. But when I'm seeing a seven point spread between registered voters and likely voters, I'm thinking, hmm. Speaker 4 (6:31) I mean, it is fairly. Speaker 4 (6:36) conservative, right? Their numbers tend to be in the middle of the distribution in any poll. So for them to be out there is interesting, maybe unexpected. I mean, I think we've seen elections like 2010, which was actually, you know, the biggest midterm swing in history because you went from, or at least since World War II, because you went from this very, very blue map in 06 and 08, where Obama won basically a landslide against John McCain to kind of a landslide the other direction so it's like a full 180 degree reversal um that election featured a very large enthusiasm gap it was something like five or six points difference between registered voters which at that point democrats had a big registration advantage and the likely voter electorate that turned up so like like five or six points is actually not totally out of bounds for a midterm. I mean, look, obviously I wouldn't bet on D plus 15. If it's D plus 15, then like that's the fucking nuclear apocalypse, right? South Carolina flips and 50 house seats flip, right? That's a little bit hard to believe, but I'm glad we're not seeing the pollsters heard. We're seeing, you know, the Harvard-Harris-Mark Penn poll. I don't know that. Harvard University should be... I don't really like Harvard, so fuck them. But like, if Speaker 5 (7:54) I were Harvard University... What's with all these red Speaker 6 (7:55) eyes today? I'm catching strays from Harvard University. Speaker 5 (7:57) I mean, Harris X has been showing very bold numbers for Republicans for a while. This Speaker 6 (8:01) is directed mostly at Mark Penn, I Speaker 4 (8:03) believe. Yeah, I think Mark Penn is kind of a hack. And like, I don't know why Harvard... Clinton's pollster, Speaker 6 (8:08) just for context, right? Speaker 4 (8:10) Wasn't he famously the Clinton's pollster? Well, he was famously Clinton's pollster and... kind of ran Clinton's campaign in 2008, which of course lost to Barack Obama. We're Speaker 6 (8:18) going wildly astray. I want to ask you. Speaker 4 (8:20) I just don't like, I think elite higher ed is probably net harmful to. That's Speaker 6 (8:24) a whole. Speaker 4 (8:24) Okay, that's a take for another time. Speaker 6 (8:26) But the University of Chicago here. University Speaker 5 (8:28) of Chicago is kind of an exception. As an aside for folks who are having difficulty following along at home, the reason you're talking about. Harvard University's polling is that they partner with Harris X. And their recent poll out this week showed that the generic ballot is tied between Republicans and Democrats amongst registered voters and that Democrats only lead by two percentage points with likely voters, which is a significant outlier when looking at the polling overall. We Speaker 4 (8:54) welcome pollster diversity. We don't want hurting. I just if I were the University of Harvard. Or Harvard University. Speaker 5 (9:03) I'm not sure Speaker 4 (9:04) that Mark Penn would be on my A-list of people that I want my brand associated with. Speaker 6 (9:09) Going back to the actual problem at hand, you wrote this week or last week about Democratic gains mostly being in red states. Can you break down that observation a little bit? Speaker 4 (9:20) Yeah, this might have to do with gas and particularly diesel prices where all these corn producing states in the Midwest, you know, states with trucking states that produce petroleum. But that's where you've seen the most shocking shifts, if you believe the polls, are in states like Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, where you have a quasi-independent, basically a Democrat running in Osborne. That's where you see it in Texas, right? So that whole kind of like tornado alley row of states is looking pretty twisty for Republicans right now. Falling through on that Speaker 6 (9:59) metaphor. Speaker 4 (10:00) But at the same time, I mean, we're going to be probably reminding you about this every week. Those are also the kind of states where the polling error has been concentrated in recent years. You know, the thesis the polls are showing is that all these voters that shifted to Trump, so working class whites and Hispanics, especially kind of working class Hispanics, are shifting out of that coalition. Speaker 4 (10:25) Is that a plausible story? Well, it makes sense. If Trump is now much more unpopular than the people that migrated toward him might be the first ones out. You know what? I think that intersects in a funny way with the with the likely voters stuff, too. Right. Like I kind of think one story that gets really bad for Republicans is that these people just don't turn out. Right. They're like Trump is not really keeping his promises. I don't like James Tallarico, but I'm sure as fuck I'm not going to vote for Ken Paxton. I'm just going to, you know, so. The lack of turnout, I think, is a plausible story. At the same time, like, would anyone be really shocked if there was another polling error in either direction? I wouldn't think so. Speaker 6 (11:06) Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster, responded to your red states getting bluer analysis with a chart that read, quote, the redder the state, the more the polls overstated the Democrat. Speaker 4 (11:16) Galen and Nate, Speaker 6 (11:17) do you agree with that? Speaker 4 (11:18) I feel like it should be like a rhyming, the rent of the state, the more the Nate or something like that, right? It feels like it needed to rhyme. I Speaker 5 (11:24) think this is an interesting suggestion. I mean, he points to actual data going back over several elections. When I look at the swings that we're seeing underneath the hood, this is how I contextualize what we're seeing. We are seeing significantly larger swings with Hispanic voters and younger voters. We are seeing significantly smaller swings with white voters. and older voters. So we're going to get into this, but a place like Maine, you're not going to expect to swing all that much. A place like Texas, which is young and diverse, you're going to expect to swing a lot. Looking at a place like Texas, I actually don't think that's a prime suspect for questioning the polls as much as, say, Iowa or Ohio, because Iowa and Ohio, as Nate said, overrepresent non-college educated white voters who polls have missed. And actually, he posted some other data as well, Patrick Ruffini did, saying that in Echelon Insight's own polling, they target places like Iowa, Ohio, and Indiana as being the most likely places to be missing strong Republican voters, which means both they prefer the Republican at the Senate or House level, and they are also going to vote, right? Because There's a lot of folks that pollsters are missing who just, as I've said, aren't going to vote. That would be why I would be looking mostly at the Midwest in that case and not as much at a place like, say, Maine or Texas. Speaker 6 (12:49) Did you have a response to Ruffini? Speaker 4 (12:51) Well, look, I mean, to some extent, this is why Flipper combines polls with priors and fundamentals and other kinds of kinds of data. As compared to our presidential model, it actually like in 2020. Speaker 4 (13:06) It actually had Maine as a toss-up with Susan Collins, even though Sarah Gideon led in all the polls because it's like the prior at that point was so strong for Collins. I mean, the other thing I'd say, though, if we are in like a D plus nine national environment, then through a uniform swing, then like Iowa is only a R plus three state or something like that. Texas is R plus three. Ohio is zero. So like it's not that bad. Crazy, but I don't know. Can Speaker 6 (13:37) I ask? I mean, you mentioned Maine a little bit, like our last stop on our sort of midterms. What's new roundup? There were some interesting conflicting signals this week in polling or last week, I guess. The Time Sienna Portland Press Herald poll of Maine had Susan Collins leading Troy Jackson by three points, 49 to 46. What do you guys make of this outlier? I mean, it is. Literally an outlier. Because if you Speaker 5 (14:01) look at the polling average right now, Troy Jackson leads by two and a half points. But this gets at something that I was just saying before, which is we are seeing sort of older, whiter populations swing less. And so I think that's part of the reason that you would see perhaps like a stickier population in Maine. But also the fact that, you know, Susan Collins has a long established independent brand and Troy Jackson is quite literally not the person that Maine voters chose. Speaker 4 (14:29) Yeah, look, I think Maine is very sui generis. How the fuck do you say that? That's Speaker 5 (14:33) correct. Speaker 4 (14:34) Okay. I Speaker 5 (14:34) don't think something can be very sui generis. I think it just has to be sui generis. Speaker 4 (14:38) Okay, thanks, Grammarly Galen. Speaker 4 (14:43) Maine's a weird... I love Maine. Maine is a top five state, I would say. What Speaker 6 (14:48) is in the top five? Just sidebar for a second. New Speaker 4 (14:51) York, Michigan. main Speaker 4 (14:56) Colorado is pretty good. Speaker 6 (14:58) No, but Colorado is great. Great Sands National Monument. Speaker 4 (15:02) Yeah, I mean, Speaker 6 (15:03) Hawaii? Speaker 4 (15:05) Okay, Speaker 5 (15:06) sure. Have you ever been to Hawaii, Nate? Speaker 4 (15:07) Once, yeah. It was very beautiful. It was way more beautiful and way more expensive than I was expecting. Speaker 6 (15:13) That sounds right. That does sound right. Now that Zuck has bought up half of Hawaii, right? Can I also just say something Speaker 5 (15:20) more broadly here, which is that if you look back at the last midterms in 2022 and you compare those results to the presidential results in 2020, you see a red wave in Florida and New York and a blue wave in Pennsylvania in 2022. I don't expect there to be that Speaker 4 (15:38) much divergence this Speaker 5 (15:40) time around. There were unique circumstances, especially around Dobbs, because in states where people literally felt like abortion was on the ballot, they were more likely to turn out for Democrats. Whereas in places like New York, where it wasn't really under question, there was a backlash to an unpopular Biden administration and unpopular Democrats running the state. So I think in a midterm where there is a bunch of different contests with a bunch of different people at the top of the ticket, unlike a presidential election where basically it's a single contest fought across 50 different states. We should expect candidate quality to matter. We should expect campaign money to matter. It's Speaker 6 (16:15) a heterogeneous kind of election. Speaker 5 (16:16) Exactly. And so I think in general, broadly, we will see a shift left. But I think the shift left could be, well, first of all, we could see actually a shift right in Maine. We're likely to see a shift right in Maine. But if the shift left will vary dramatically based on the demographic makeup of a state, based on the candidates that are running there, we shouldn't expect. uniformity in this race. Speaker 6 (16:36) It's kind of interesting because the country in general post, you know, Biden and the second Trump term with all of these conflicts does feel like it is ideologically in flux. And like we've talked about that, like especially in the first show where we talked about like, are we in the middle of, are we at the beginning of this sort of epic shift of demographics? And that's kind of an interesting little, I don't know. Speaker 4 (16:58) Yeah, I remember there was actually Democrats lost ground, Kamala Harris lost ground in 24. particularly in big urban cities like New York, right, or kind of inner city Chicago, you know, parts of that might be kind of because people think these areas are not governed particularly well. You kind of have the abundance rebellion, right? You know, and if you're in New York, you're still very aware of what it's like to be in a state governed by Democrats. If you're in Kansas, then it'll actually has a Democratic governor. But like, But you're