Is AI About to Break Politics?

Still Counting

This episode of Still Counting explores new polling indicating a strong Democratic lead in the generic ballot ahead of the midterms, alongsi

Key takeaways

• Democrats hold an eight-and-a-half-point lead in the generic ballot among likely voters, consistent across multiple polls.
• Immigration is no longer a Republican strength; Democrats now have higher trust on immigration than Republicans, especially among college-educated voters.

Main topics

• Midterm election polling trends
• Democratic momentum in 2024

Notable quotes

"I don't think immigration is going to motivate nearly as many votes. Certainly not." – Nate Silver

Conclusion

The episode concludes that Democrats are in a strong position heading into

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) I'm practicing my lean. Speaker 2 (0:00) Yeah. The podcast wraparound. The Speaker 1 (0:03) wraparound. Speaker 2 (0:04) Nate, the podcast wraparound. The reach around. I have to talk. Reach around, wrap around. Speaker 1 (0:09) Babe. Speaker 2 (0:09) No. Not, it's the former, not the latter. We don't need HR on our case on our second official episode. Okay. Okay. Okay. Here we go. Speaker 2 (0:20) Welcome to Still Counting. I'm Galen Baruch. I'm Claire Malone. And Speaker 3 (0:23) I'm Nate Silver. On Speaker 2 (0:25) today's show, new polling suggests Democrats are in a stronger position than ever for the midterms. So have the midterms broken their way? And what would that even entail? Then concerns about AI safety have broken containment and entered the political debate. We're going to discuss what Silicon Valley and now Washington are fighting about, what Americans think, and how it's changing politics. But first... the midterms. So since our last episode, there has been quite a bunch of new polling, included one from the New York Times, Siena College. In fact, Nate, you talked with Dan Pfeiffer of Pod Save America yesterday about that polling, and folks can go check out that special on YouTube. But we're going to talk about it more here and about what the model shows us more broadly. So, and usually we suggest that we don't write an article or do a segment based on one poll, which... We're not going to. We're going to talk about the whole sort of universe of new polling. But this is one. The New York Times is sort of. It's real good. It's real good. At this point, it drives the political conversation. It's Speaker 3 (1:28) a Speaker 2 (1:28) very high quality poll. Speaker 3 (1:30) Look, ordinarily, if our wonderful producers had asked us to do a segment on one poll, I would have said, no, sorry, I'm going for a walk or something instead. Or we're going to write about how, you know, whether AI is going to kill us all. The reason I chose to do this, and you can go to the YouTube. feed for more on this is because it's actually not an outlier, right? It's consistent with almost all the polling we've seen. Well, Speaker 2 (1:52) let's say what it says, which is Democrats leading in the generic ballot, which is when pollsters asked. Do you support a Democrat or Republican for Congress? Speaker 3 (2:01) Okay, fair enough. Fucking generic Speaker 2 (2:02) ballot is. Okay, Democrats lead in the generic ballot by about eight and a half points, according to the latest poll. Speaker 3 (2:07) On a likely voter basis. Yeah, we talked about last week how after Labor Day, pollsters traditionally switch over from using registered voters to likely voters. And our model, Flipper, eh. Speaker 2 (2:19) That's never going to get old. That's always going to be creepy. I thought it was a Speaker 3 (2:23) weaker. The week one dolphin noise was better. That dolphin feels like. I Speaker 2 (2:27) know that was a throwaway. I found it more palatable. Speaker 3 (2:30) But, you know, our model had detected that likely voter polls were likely to be better for Democrats. So it was kind of priced in to some extent. But still, to see Democrats up by eight and a half points, it can be eight or nine, depending on how you round it, is consistent with what we thought. But any notion of like, oh, people will come back, kids come back to school and then we'll see Republicans rebound because, you know, their voters get fired up by Democrats being too left wing or be loyal to President Trump. I mean, there's not very many signs of that. Instead, you see in the New York Times poll a pretty big gap between likeliness to vote between Harris 2024 voters and Trump 2024 voters. And you also see independents. really leaning toward Democrats in their congressional races. Speaker 2 (3:16) Right. Something like a little over 60 percent of Harris 2024 voters saying they're almost certain to vote. Which is Speaker 1 (3:22) why J.D. Vance is telling all of the Republican voters to go Speaker 2 (3:27) out and vote. Right. And it was like it was something like 56, 58 percent of Trump 2024 voters. We got this. I'm suggesting here that we got a lot of data here beyond just that generic ballot top line. Claire, what stuck out to you in. The latest poll. Speaker 1 (3:42) Honestly, the immigration and economy numbers. Democrats on immigration, people trust them 52 percent. Democrat 45 percent. And on the economy, they trust Democrats 51 percent to Republicans 45 percent. The immigration number in particular, when I was first scanning through, I was like, oh, that's really interesting because that's obviously where Trump was kind of doing his bread and butter work. Since 2016, but particularly in the last year, obviously, there's been a lot of immigration actions by the administration and the economy. It's like all we can talk about ever is the affordability crisis. I mean, I was texting a group of friends yesterday about the bond market and interest rates for home loans because, you know, that's what you worry about when you're almost 40. And so I think a lot of people, you know, just those are really terrible numbers for a Republican that basically made. his campaign and his party sort of coalesce around those two issues. Yeah, Speaker 3 (4:42) it's driven, as you might expect, by college educated voters, voters with an advanced degree or degree are 59, 37 in favor of democratic policy on immigration. Non-college voters who are the majority electorate lean toward Republicans by only by only four points there, five points, excuse me. So, yeah, you see, I think the aftermath of, you know. of Minneapolis. Also, I mean, ironically, you can argue that in certain ways Trump is being penalized for his own success. I mean, we have had a lot less immigration on the southern border, right? So like it might be a less visible problem. And so now Trump looks more extreme with some of the ICE actions and things like that. But yeah, this was supposed to be his strength. It's not as bad as like some of his other numbers, but it's no longer a strength. It's a it's a it's a lesser weakness, I guess you'd say. Speaker 2 (5:36) Yeah, I mean, folks will have heard me say on a previous podcast that voters still prefer Republicans over Democrats on immigration. Now, this is likely voters, which sort of. Trump overrepresents college educated voters, high propensity voters, people who are very locked in. The electorate will look different come 2028. But this is a change, right? This is Trump's biggest strength becoming a vulnerability that is on par with the economy and foreign wars, according to this, right? Underwater Republicans are by seven points on the economy, immigration, foreign wars. Well, Speaker 3 (6:11) I don't I just I Speaker 2 (6:12) don't think. Well, sorry, I don't think immigration is going to motivate nearly as Speaker 3 (6:15) many votes. Certainly not. But in terms Speaker 2 (6:16) of preferences between the two parties, I mean, it's obvious that affordability is the number one issue in this election. Speaker 3 (6:23) Are we are we doing the affordability thing? I call it inflation, man. Affordability feels too euphemistic to me. I have an objection to that term. OK, OK. Speaker 1 (6:31) Yeah. Now I want to hear it. Speaker 3 (6:33) So we've always called it. I mean, affordability might be kind of like technically more accurate, but it feels like a little bit of what about it? What about Speaker 1 (6:39) it? I mean. Speaker 3 (6:42) It just feels like a neo... How do you say neologism or whatever, right? But I feel like it's a word that is a little bit... contains a little spin. I mean, there are a lot of political terms, you know, that I have. But doesn't it have to also Speaker 1 (6:54) do with wages not keeping up with inflation or cost of living? Isn't it more encompassing than simply just inflation itself? Isn't it wage stagnation? I just feel like we spend Speaker 3 (7:03) a lot of time in the Biden era denying that inflation was so high or that voters had realistic reasons to be concerned about it. And then it kind of transformed. I'm just interested in political language. Probably you think I'm making an annoying pedantic objection. That's why I'm Nate. But the thing is, it's Speaker 2 (7:21) a new term. I don't think that what people are pissed off about is just the fact that we're experiencing sort of 3.4 % annualized inflation. I think people are feeling, well, the accumulation of inflation over a six-year span, but also the sense that, and there are certain parts of the economy that have to do also with interest rates. You're just talking about home costs. which are not directly inflation, but cost of living, if you want to call it cost of living, great. Let me make a point, though, on exactly that, which is that in your silver bulletin model, when you look at Trump's approval rating on the cost of living, inflation, whatever the fuck you want to call it, he's 40 percentage points underwater. Like it's really, really, it's really fucking bad. When you look at this, though, when you look at, you know, the economy or cost of living in this, Democrats only lead Republicans by seven or eight points, right? Republicans are still getting 43 to 45 percent of the electorate on this issue. That means that there are a lot of people who are not happy with what Trump is doing, but are not going to vote for a Democrat. They're still going to vote for a Republican when push comes to shove. And there are a lot of people who still remember the Biden. years. Speaker 1 (8:34) The communist thing still works. And I do, I mean, to go back to your thing about the Biden years and inflation, that is true, right? Like there was a little bit of, um, yeah, Speaker 3 (8:43) it's like, oh, it's misinformation. Like gas, a little gas, yeah, a little gas, $5 a gallon gas. It's not misinformation. That's like, you know, that's actually what you have to pay if you actually try to get your, your tank filled. Um, but look, there's this famous, I think Bill Clinton debate answer in 1992, where, um, where a woman asks a question about the national debt and President Bush answers it very literally. And then Clinton realizes this woman just has concerns about the economy in general and answers it less literally and talks about inflation and things like that. And so, you know, I'm just sensitive to like political speech because people were not calling it affordability in the previous presidency. I feel like it's a piece of. framing that's actually effective. Like if I were John Ossoff or Cory Booker or something, I'd use that term. But I'm just sensitive to like the speech. I also Speaker 1 (9:31) think it's it is more setting aside the the Biden or the politicized use of it. I do think it's more descriptive of how people feel. Like the reason why I was texting about the bond market is because shout out to Ben Castleman, former 538 staffer, who is now the chief economics correspondent at The Times. He was on The Daily yesterday, and he said this one thing that really freaked me out, which was basically like, actually, maybe the last 20 years of low interest rates were the aberration itself and that we will just have like forever high interest rates. And I think that coupled with the fact that like the first home that people buy in America, the price of it has gone up. astronomically in New York. I mean, let's not even talk about it. It feels sort of a filthy thing to say. And those things coupled with like 30, what, grocery prices are 30 % higher than they were in 2020. It just feels more encompassing and atmospheric than to say like interest rates or inflation. I Speaker 3 (10:28) agree. Maybe my point is too pedantic, but like, look, people place, people don't cleanly differentiate the different economic anxieties. that they have, right? And it's always been based on a mix of kind of vibes and objective data. I mean, that was kind of one of my big critiques about like... about the Biden years, people would say, well, the economy is actually doing fairly well by jobs related measures. And it's just bad vibes. Like, well, the vibes are always bad because press coverage is usually negative. And like a lot of people in a lot of westernized countries feel as though they're getting the wrong end of the deal. And, you know, we now have one or two Speaker 2 (11:04) percent growth per Speaker 3 (11:05) year instead of two or three or four percent. And that that compounds over periods of time. Let me Speaker 2 (11:09) say retroactively, we should have called it an affordability issue under Biden. as opposed to just not calling it an affordability issue under Trump. And I say that because when you look at the data, Americans were becoming literally poorer for the first basically three years of Biden's presidency, which is to say prices were growing faster than wages. And by the summer of 2022, by a real significant clip. And so Americans, as much as you could say, oh, but like, look at employment levels. Americans were getting poorer and you couldn't tell them. don't believe you're lying pocketbook or whatever. Let's zoom back out to the midterms overall. When we sat down here last week for our first episode, your Senate model over at Silver Bulletin was roughly 50-50. And I made a joke about you amping up the drama as we returned from our summer vacations. Now Democrats are back up to about 60 % in your Senate model. I think that's the highest they have been since you launched. I imagine the New York Times-Santa College poll is a piece of this, but not the whole. Speaker 3 (12:11) Yeah. I mean, the model is designed so that any one individual poll should not affect it all that much, right? It's the overall constellation of polling. You know, Quinnipiac had a poll showing Democrats up 11 points on the generic ballot. YouGov has them up like 10 or 11. among likely voters. They're doing much better than among registered voters. Marquette University, which is a strong pollster, had them up some gargantuan number, like 12 or 13 points. It's not even in our model yet. That came out this morning. So it's been pretty consistent. It's also been like, it's really hard now to find any Texas polls where James Tallarico is not ahead. He's ahead within the margin of error in any individual poll, but collectively that presents a fair amount of evidence. Sure, Brown's been ahead in basically every poll of Ohio. There are some exceptions. I mean, New Hampshire polling has been maybe surprisingly close. We talked a little bit about New Hampshire last week. But, you know, our flipper is actually... pretty steady and stubborn. For our presidential model, it moves faster because you have more of a focal point on just this one race that has 50 different manifestations in 50 states. Despite that, we are gathering a fairly consistent story about Democratic performance in these polls has been quite strong post-Labor Day. And Speaker 1 (13:28) does this, what we're looking at right now, take into account the fact that Cook just moved its rating for New Hampshire? Oh, my God. Does this account for that Cook? Race moves? Speaker 3 (13:38) It does, except we have to de-bias the expert ratings because they are completely miscalibrated to what any reasonable person, probably including them, thinks what the national environment is going to be. Speaker 2 (13:51) Yeah, we got a listener question on this, which I was debating whether or not we should dive into. Let's do it really quickly and then we'll move on to whether AI is going to kill us. Corco Queen on X asked about the gap between the quantitative forecast models like yours and the model at Split Ticket, which is the argument. Our friend Lakshya Jain runs that. Vote Hub, which is Zachary Danini, where Democrats are projected to win, in your model, like 30 plus seats. The modal outcome is like 30 plus seats in the House or 27 seats over at Split Ticket, etc.