We’re Back! What’s Changed in US Politics?

Still Counting

Nate Silver, Clare Malone, and Galen Druke reunite for the launch of their new podcast, Still Counting, reflecting on their individual journ

Key takeaways

• The media landscape has shifted from being more centrist than voters to becoming increasingly polarized, with partisan content dominating platforms like Substack.

Main topics

• Return of the podcast team after five years apart
• Changes in U.S. politics and media since 2020

Notable quotes

"You take a country of 350 million people... and you smoosh it down into a flat surface where there are only two political parties."

Conclusion

The team reaffirms their mission to deliver thoughtful, data-driven political

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) You guys know your jobs, right? Mm-hmm. Yes. I'm not introducing you. You're introducing yourselves. Okay. It's a whole new world. Welcome to Still Counting. I'm Galen Druk. I'm Claire Malone. And I'm Nate Silbert. We are back, as folks may know by now. Nate, Claire, and I are getting back together to start a sequel, if you will. Start a new show. Before we get to our official episode, first episode, which is launching Wednesday. It's like episode, okay, this is like episode 0. Fine. It's the introduction to our book. It's a mini-sode, as our friends at Crooked have been calling it, which is a new term for me, which I like. Our first episode, dear listener, launches on Wednesday, September 9th, so mark it down on your calendars. Speaker 1 (0:44) Subscribe, smash that subscribe button on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, wherever you listen to podcasts, you get the drill. But before we sort of dive in with the midterms and Trump and like the parties and everything that is going to take up a lot of our time for the coming, I was going to say year, two years, three, whatever it may be. The long campaign. We wanted to turn the mics on, warm up, talk about. Speaker 1 (1:10) a little about where we've been, what we're doing with the show, how we ended up here, answer some burning listener questions, and also play... Do we even have listeners yet? How can the listeners have questions if we have no listeners at this point? Hey, hey. I mean, aspirational listeners. Write us questions. I don't have an email address for you yet. I mean, the folks on social media dropped some questions. Yeah, yeah. I mean, mostly people were very enthusiastic, which we were so excited to hear, right? Apparently, Sarah Jessica Parker retweeted us, which is the only thing I care about. I actually haven't seen it. I don't know if she has Twitter. OK, so let's talk a little bit about what we've been up to for the past. So, Claire, we haven't sat down for an official podcast right before January 6th, 2021. Well, you know what? I went back and looked this morning. I departed 538. Speaker 1 (2:04) in December of 2020. So in my memory, I thought that I was still employed by 530. Am I allowed to say 530? Yeah, it's a joke. They just bleep it out. Yes, please bleep it out. No, so I think my last podcast episode with you guys must have been December 2020. So the election had happened. But I do, I mean, I have very vivid memories of watching January 6th happen at like the same desk and on the same computer where I recorded the podcast. So I smushed it all together. But like, yes, we haven't been together in this form in five years. The last time we were, I guess, together in person, we did not know what the world had in store for the country, us, the parties, whatnot. First, let's talk about where we've been since. December 2020. Then we'll talk about where the country's been since December 2020. So Claire, why don't you kick us off? Okay. Wow. So I... Speaker 1 (3:05) It's so much, actually. I freelanced for a while. I made a podcast about Hollywood and pop culture for The Ringer, which was actually super fun. I had sort of like my rumspring a year of like not doing as much about politics, which was really fun. You wrote a cover story for New York Magazine about Andrew Yang. Yeah, that was fun. And then I kind of got like my dream job, which I. I still have. I am a writer at The New Yorker. I cover media and politics. And I'm currently on leave from that job, writing a book about the Maha movement and Bobby Kennedy and, you know, which I'm really excited about. So I'm kind of on leave for a year and doing that book and reporting for it and writing it. And so, yeah, that's my kind of like quick. So tell me, Claire, what's up with all these beef tallow chips? Are they going to make me live forever? Speaker 1 (3:59) Well, Galen, a lot of people think it's a cleaner fat, a cleaner oil, right? Oh, that's a whole, you know. I'm so excited for this book to come out and be able to ask you all of my quirky health questions. Yeah, seed oils. You can talk seed oils. Whole milk. By which I mean unpasteurized milk. Raw milk, yeah. What have you been up to? So they culled the herd at ABC 538 one at a time, right? We're going in order, actually. We are going in order. First man down. Yeah, exactly. No, I started a Substack newsletter called Silver Bulletin. I took about two seconds to come up with that name. Thank you very much. But it's kind of stuck now. And it's kind of my dream job in some ways, right? I'm my own boss. I actually have incentive to... Speaker 1 (4:48) To work hard. Don't get me wrong. I work my ass off for ABC News for most of it. You do work hard. For most of it. Important caveat there. For the first like eight and a half years, the contract until they totally fucked around at the end. But no, the newsletter is great. We've been able to build or rebuild most of the models that we have. We have a team of four, counting me right now. And now I have this show with you guys that I'm very excited about. We're very excited to have it with you. So I left. Speaker 1 (5:17) 538 slash abc last which would have been march of 2025 i'll be honest it felt like if we're really like pulling back the curtain it felt for a while like i was recording a podcast on the deck of a sinking ship like all all of my like main sort of friends on the ship had gone overboard and i was just still there you know every day turning up the mic and whatnot but anyway so 538 went down early march of 2025 I started a new podcast called GD Politics, which is a play on, yes, both of my initials, but also goddamn politics. I think the way that many people feel about politics these days. Started it on St. Patrick's Day in honor of one of my best friends, one of my best Irish Catholic friends. Thank you. And my parents' anniversary. Aw. Yeah. So, yeah, we kind of got the podcast up and running two weeks after 538 went down. And I'm still talking with... Speaker 1 (6:11) folks who used to work at FiveThirtyEight, like Nathaniel Rakich, Mary Radcliffe. I'm talking to pollsters and all different authors, some politicians. We made news with Lisa Murkowski. She told me she would consider becoming an independent under the right circumstances. The podcast is great. There's so many, I mean, and also, yeah, just like a shout out to all the FiveThirtyEight expats who are now like scattered to the winds, but are all doing such. Speaker 1 (6:34) We've secretly infiltrated all of media to make data journalism present everywhere. But anyway, so I have been doing that for the past year and a half now. And it's been a lot of, it's on Substack. So I've been working with Nate over on Substack, which has been a lot of fun. And it's kind of my dream job too. You know, I get to have a lot of fun conversations with many different smart people. And now I get to have, which I'm going to continue doing that, by the way, that other podcast. But now I'm going to have. more fun conversations with more people I love right here every Wednesday. We should say why we're doing this show. I think when we first started talking about it, it was basically just like, we want to do what we used to do. We want to have a smart conversation. And we don't want to... Speaker 1 (7:17) change it that much. And in some ways that's, you know, we talked to a lot of different people. In some ways that's why we ended up at Crooked because I think they had listened to the old show and kind of knew what we did and liked it. And we didn't really want to, you know, curb our analysis or sort of maybe strong opinions or things that came across on the show. We just wanted to make our show. Speaker 1 (7:44) And that's kind of why we've ended up here. You know, we're all journalists in one form or another. And that's what we're going to do on this show. We're going to be journalists. We're going to have our analysis. And I don't know. I'm excited we landed here. Although it is nice to work with a team, right? Yes, totally. Very much so. Because people say, why don't you just put your shows in the Substack? And by the way, I'll still have video interviews on my Substack that aren't related to like this content necessarily. But yeah, I don't know. Speaker 1 (8:14) been experienced enough to be kind of an old media hand. And I just got good vibes that they were really interested and engaged. A couple of things. One, I think to your point, Claire, Crooked basically said, we want to support you in making the podcast you want to make. And that was really exciting. And we asked a lot of questions. We asked a lot of questions. And one of them was like, of course, Crooked is a progressive, democratically aligned media company. And we are not a democratically aligned.