We don’t do much legal analysis here at Silver Bulletin. Part of it is that it’s not really my area of expertise. If we’re being honest, it’s also that I tend to find takes on the Supreme Court from the “usual political types” to be annoying, and I don’t want to emulate that.

But we do, of course, perform statistical analysis at Silver Bulletin. And that’s the lens through which I’m going to approach the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision last week, which reduced the power of the Voting Rights Act. Whether the Court “gutted” the VRA or this was more of a compromise is variously interpreted by different legal analysts, and I’m not inclined to referee that debate — although I will say my prior is that the current court seems to have very little interest in putting any constraints on how districts are drawn.

The practical upshot is this: the decision will allow Republicans to district out some Democrats in majority-minority districts that were previously protected by the VRA. Because we’re fairly close to the midterms, some of the impact will come this year and some will come in 2028. After Virginia passed a referendum last month that will allow Democrats to conduct a partisan redistricting of the state, it had actually looked like Democrats might come out ahead from the mid-decade redistricting war touched off by Texas. Now, the map will probably have a slight Republican bias — although probably not enough to overcome what looks like a strong political environment for Democrats.

The other implication is that the redistricting wars will continue in 2028, presumably with both parties getting even more aggressive. Weakening the VRA does provide one silver lining for Democrats, however: they also have their own districts in blue states where there are far more Democratic voters than they need to essentially guarantee winning every election. Many of these districts are majority-minority or close to it. With fewer legal hurdles and a demonstrated willingness to go maximalist, they’re likely to draw much more aggressive maps in states like New York and Colorado prior to 2028. Even in California, where Gavin Newsom’s new map is expected to reduce the number of Republican seats to around 4, Democrats could go further, packing Republican voters into as few as 1-3 districts — or even zero Republicans if they’re willing to tolerate some ugly, spaghetti-string maps.

But Democrats in states like Maryland and Illinois have expressed a different concern: maximally aggressive districting could reduce the number of Black and other minority members in Congress. I’m not here to police this preference as a moral claim. Representation is important. Losing out on seats because you want more representation isn’t a price I’d pay, but my opinion doesn’t count any more than any other citizen’s.

However, I believe the empirical assumptions behind this presumed trade-off are faulty. Before I show you the math, the basic intuition is this: One of the best ways to have more minorities in Congress is simply to elect more Democrats, since Democratic members are far more likely to be members of racial or ethnic minority groups. Almost half of current Democratic members of Congress are Black, Hispanic, Asian American or Native American, as compared to under 10 percent of Republicans.

Post-Callais, redistricting in red, Southern states will almost certainly reduce the number of Black members elected to Congress — and also, of course, the number of Democrats. But this is not necessarily true for blue states. In fact, carefully drawn maps could actually increase minority representation in Congress without any real trade-off in the expected number of Democratic seats. I’ll show you an example of this below.

This will get slightly technical with a bunch of charts, which is why I’ve unfurled the Model Talk banner for the first time in a while. To keep the scope manageable, I’ll focus on Black voters and Black members of the U.S. House in this analysis. (I wouldn’t necessarily assume that other groups follow precisely the same patterns.)

The statistics of Black representation in Congress

As of the 2024 election, 60 of the 435 voting members1 of the U.S. House were Black. That’s 14 percent, actually more than the Black share of the U.S. population.

Black representation in the U.S. Senate has historically been much lower, however, which leads to understandable concern that only electorates with a substantial Black population will routinely elect Black representatives.

But in the House, the pattern is a little bit more linear than you might assume. It’s true that districts with a Black population share of 40 percent or more are highly likely to elect Black members. But there’s no hard lower bound. In districts that are between 20 and 30 percent Black, 27 percent of U.S. House members are Black. There are also 9 Black members from districts with Black population share of 10 percent or lower — but since there are a lot of such districts, that represents only 3 percent of the possible seats.

This also gets complicated by the fact that the Black share of a district is strongly correlated with its tendency to elect Democrats. So let’s look at that too, this time comparing Kamala Harris’s margin in each district against Donald Trump in 2024 to its share of Black representatives.

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Janet Mills, the 78-year-old governor of Maine, lost the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate today. Instead, the nominee is all but certain to be Graham Platner, a 41-year-old oyster fisherman from the tiny town of Sullivan1, known for his progressive politics and poor tattoo choices, who had never run for elected office before.

Officially, this won’t go down in the record books as an “L” for Mills; instead, she announced today that she was suspending her campaign. But unless there are key facts that haven’t been reported yet, this was mostly a face-saving measure: she dropped out because she was going to lose. Mills trailed Platner by about 30 points in recent polls and had shown no signs of forward progress. She was also performing worse than Platner in polling for the projected November matchup against Susan Collins. I said this after Joe Biden dropped out too, so I want to be consistent: if you quit because you don’t think you can win, that should count as an “at-bat”, a shot on goal that didn’t hit the target.

If she had defeated both Platner and Collins, Mills would have been the oldest first-term senator. But did that really make a difference in the nation’s oldest state? Maybe that’s not giving enough credit to Platner, for instance, whose rough edges and outsider-ness seems to be regarded by Mainers as a feature rather than a bug.

Well, maybe. I looked up the current ages (as of Apr. 30) of Democratic candidates in Senate races that most analysts consider “competitive”. In many cases, the primaries have not happened yet, so I listed all candidates in these races who seem to have a viable shot at the nomination: this included three candidates in Michigan, and two each in Iowa and Minnesota.

Then I compared the ages of this year’s crop of Democrats to the last time Democrats ran against Trump in a midterm in 2018, based on their ages as of Apr. 30, 2018. Independent candidates who are de facto Democrats are included.

That’s a bigger difference than I was expecting! The median age of Democratic candidates in competitive Senate races has dropped from 63 to 45.5.

Part of that is because a far greater number of incumbent Democrats faced difficult races in 2018, mostly red-state Democrats like Joe Manchin left over from a less partisan era. Georgia’s Jon Ossoff is really the only incumbent Democrat facing a tough race this year (and it might not be that tough). There are some other potentially competitive D-held seats (Michigan, New Hampshire and arguably Minnesota) this year, but Democratic incumbents are retiring in each of them. Still, even excluding incumbents, the average age of Democratic nominees has dropped from 57 to 48.

Of course, it’s hard to separate out age from establishment-ness, and they’re frequently correlated. In New York City, where Zohran Mamdani’s primary win was another sign of generational turnover, being literally half of Andrew Cuomo’s age helped to accentuate the contrasts.

And the Democratic electorate does seem to retain a pragmatic streak. Former governor Roy Cooper, age 68, won the Democratic nomination in North Carolina essentially uncontested. Sherrod Brown, the former U.S. Senator, is 73 years old and all but certain to be the Democratic nominee in Ohio. However, both Cooper and Brown are A-list recruits, probably the strongest candidates Democrats could have chosen in those races.

It’s less clear whether Mills or Platner would have had a better chance to defeat Collins. As much as we like our polling here at Silver Bulletin, there’s a long way to go until November. Platner’s past writings include many things that might offend conservatives as well as liberals, and Collins notoriously outperformed her polling in 2020.

Still, in ranking prospective Democratic candidates for 2028, this should probably be considered a favorable sign for candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (36), Ossoff (39), Pete Buttigieg (44), and Ruben Gallego (46). Anyone Boomer or Boomer-adjacent is being regarded with increasing suspicion, by contrast.

Compared to some recent hot topics — like the Iran War and the attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner — election administration looks fairly mundane. Some might even call it dull. That’s generally a good thing, because vote counting only becomes the headline after something goes wrong. But one man who does care about election administration is Donald J. Trump. Aside from his longstanding insistence that the 2020 election was “stolen” — which, of course, it wasn’t — the president has put out a steady stream of executive orders and Truths about how Americans vote and how those votes are counted.

Many of the Trump administration’s election-related actions get held up at some point in the legal or legislative process. Still, it can be hard to know what to make of the competing executive orders and bills. Will they all get struck down in court and not change anything? Or will Trump be able to use the presidency to affect — or even steal1 — the midterms? To answer those questions, I thought it would be best to talk to someone who covers election administration for a living: Nathaniel Rakich, the Managing Editor at Votebeat (and Nate’s former colleague at FiveThirtyEight). Here’s the lightly edited transcript from our conversation.

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Eli McKown-Dawson: So before we get started — how have things been at Votebeat?

Nathaniel Rakich: They’ve been great. Elections are such a hot topic, and the administration of elections has been under the microscope to a degree that it really hasn’t been, at least during my political consciousness. These are really momentous things, and certainly, if the worst fears of people on the left come true about ICE at polling places, that’s going to be a tremendously important story. Obviously, who wins the election is the ultimate issue. But the really important thing is just making sure that everyone can vote and that all the votes are counted faithfully.

Trump’s executive orders have mostly been limited by courts

Eli: We’ll get to ICE at polling places eventually, but I’ll start a little simpler. There have been two big executive orders from the Trump administration on elections. The first one was issued about a year ago. Can you give me a brief walk-through of what was in that order and where it stands now?

Nathaniel: The first executive order was a real grab bag, and really was the first salvo in Trump trying to bring the federal government into election administration to an unprecedented degree. The main thrust of it was basically the SAVE Act and the SAVE America Act. It attempted to require people who register to vote to prove their citizenship with a document — like a passport, or a combination of documents, like a birth certificate plus a driver’s license. They tried to change voting machine certifications. Obviously, Trump pushed conspiracy theories about voting machines manipulating votes back in 2020. He’s been all about paper ballots.

The upshot is that the executive order was immediately challenged in court, mostly on the grounds that the Constitution pretty clearly delegates to the states and to Congress the power to run elections. The president does not have a role. So any executive order Trump issues is automatically going to be suspect, and that’s probably a kind word. Courts have consistently struck down, or I should say blocked, because the cases continue to proceed, and Trump could theoretically take it to the Supreme Court, the executive order. None of the major provisions from that order are operative right now, which is why the elections are proceeding normally.

Eli: A year later, we have a second elections-related executive order that was just issued. That one is more specifically about voting by mail, right?

Nathaniel: Yes. The key provision says that the Postal Service will maintain a list of people who are allowed to vote by mail, and it cannot deliver ballots from anybody who is not on this list. The confusing thing about the order is that it doesn’t specify how that list is generated. The order also contains provisions for a couple of other lists. It says that states, 60 days before the election, should send a list of people they expect to vote by mail to the US Postal Service. And then the very next provision in the executive order says the US Postal Service will send to the states a list of people who are allowed to vote by mail.

A lot of people assume that the second list is going to be based on the first list, but the order doesn’t actually say that. It doesn’t say how that second list is going to be generated. It doesn’t say anything about what the Postal Service should do with that first list from the states when they get it. And then there is a third list that appears to be completely separate from all of this. The order directs the Department of Homeland Security to create a list of US citizens above age 18 residing in every state, and to send that list to election officials in those states. Again, it does not require the state election officials to do anything with that list.

There’s been a lot of coverage that talks about this as creating a federal list of registered voters, which of course doesn’t currently exist — states and smaller municipalities like counties are responsible for maintaining their own voter rolls. But that’s not quite what this is, because it doesn’t have any legal teeth. And also, the list is not actually of voters, it is of adult citizens. That’s an important distinction, because the list doesn’t make any attempt to, for instance, weed out convicted felons who in most states can’t vote.

There have been some states, particularly Republican states, that have used federal databases to cross-compare against their voter rolls to check if they have non-citizens on the rolls, and it’s not difficult to imagine that they will use this list for a similar purpose. It’s also been speculated that the Postal Service will use the DHS list to be the intermediary between the two lists. The logic there would be: states send the Postal Service a list of voters that the states say are going to vote by mail; USPS goes through that list, strikes out the people who aren’t citizens according to the DHS list, and then sends the list back to the states, saying these are the people we think are allowed to vote by mail. But again, the order does not specify any of this. The order basically just puts these lists out into the ether.

This executive order is also being challenged in court on much the same grounds as the first one. There’s really no reason to think it’ll meet a different fate. The DHS provisions seem like they could hold up. DHS can make whatever lists it wants, especially since the list isn’t being used explicitly to remove people from voter rolls. But the parts about involving the USPS in mail voting, which is supposed to be the purview of the states, are likely to get struck down, or at least put on hold temporarily. I would be surprised if this order changes anything about the way that the midterms are run.

We are about seven months before the election, and it’s starting to get to that point where people are getting nervous about Trump trying to change rules at the last minute in ways that are perceived to benefit him.

Eli: And how involved is the Postal Service currently in administering elections?

Nathaniel: This is unprecedented. The US Postal Service has never had any other role in determining who will vote by mail. It just does the mailing.

Eli: One thing I was curious about with these lawsuits: is it all Democratic states or have there been Republicans signing on as well?

Nathaniel: It’s been partisan. There are currently four lawsuits. One is by the Democratic Party. Two were by voting rights groups. And then the last one, the most important one, is from the states. The states are obviously the ones who are the aggrieved party in this case, because it’s their powers that are being allegedly usurped by this executive order. That lawsuit was joined by Democratic officials from 23 states plus DC. That said, a couple of Republican secretaries of state have weighed in, neutrally to negatively. They’ve reacted coolly to the order, but none of them have sued over it.

Will Congress help Trump change how elections are administered? Probably not.

Eli: With both of these executive orders, what do you think the purpose was? Trump has for a long time talked about voter fraud in 2020, and non-citizens voting. But you have to assume that the expectation was that these orders would get held up in court. Did the administration expect these orders to do anything in the midterms? Or was it more of a messaging thing?

Nathaniel: That’s the million-dollar question. We don’t know what Trump’s motivation was. It’s hard to read his mind — famously, as the whole country of Iran is currently thinking about. On one hand, there’s a theory that he thought it would genuinely work. Maybe he thinks that he has these powers and thought that the courts would agree with him. Obviously, the federal court system as a whole is pretty conservative. He’s appointed a lot of them. Should it reach the Supreme Court, because of how clear the Constitution is on this issue, I still think they would rule against him, but it’s not a slam dunk. So Trump might have thought this was really going to work.

He could have thought this might not work, but it doesn’t hurt to issue the order and see what happens. And then the cynical interpretation is that he knew these weren’t going to pass court muster, but he’s just trying to stir up discontent around the election and create a premise for saying “Hey, I tried to require proof of citizenship, I tried to clean up mail voting, but the courts didn’t let me. And the election went forward and Democrats won, so it’s fraudulent.” And when the courts rule against any attempts to overturn the results, he can continue to say they stopped him, and delegitimize the election. The only thing I am comfortable saying for sure is that Trump clearly has strong feelings about elections and how they should be run, and feels that they are not run well and that it disadvantages Republicans.

And then it was, all right, Plan B — that was the SAVE Act and the SAVE America Act. If that were to pass Congress, the legal challenge would be a lot harder to make, because the Constitution explicitly says Congress can pass laws governing this process. But obviously the filibuster exists, and so that is unlikely to bear fruit as well. The timing of this executive order was probably not a coincidence, because it was after you had seen the SAVE America Act stall. Trump said you have to pass the SAVE America Act before you put any other bills on my desk. You should blow up the filibuster to do it. He put a lot of pressure on John Thune, and the votes just weren’t there to change the rules. At that point, that effort is dead. And so then Trump is like, all right, well, the ball is back in my court.

Eli: It doesn’t look like that’s going to pass at this point, right?

Nathaniel: Yes. In order for things to get through the Senate, they need to get past the filibuster, and that requires 60 votes. Republicans only have 53 votes. Democrats are never going to allow the bill to get past that threshold. A lot of Republicans were advocating using the talking filibuster.

The issue with that is that it burns potentially weeks of legislative time, and the Senate has other stuff it wants to do. A lot of Republicans didn’t even want to change the rules to do that, much less abolish the filibuster as a whole. Republicans are looking ahead to a potential future in which Democrats control the Senate again, and they would like the filibuster to still be in place at that time. So as long as the filibuster is still in place, there’s just no way for that bill to pass.

There have been talks about squeezing the SAVE America Act into the reconciliation bill somehow, which doesn’t require the 60-vote threshold. But it’s hard to make an argument for why a voting bill would be related to the budget, which is a requirement for reconciliation. So I would say that the odds that the SAVE America Act passes through the Senate are very small.

Eli: Just for the record, the SAVE America Act contains a lot of the same content as that first executive order, yes?

Nathaniel: It is the requirement for proof of citizenship. If you could ask Trump, “If you could change one thing about elections, what would it be?” — I think he would say we need voters, when they register to vote, to provide physical documentary proof of their citizenship. That is the main thrust of SAVE America. It also has a provision to require a photo ID to vote. Even for states that already have photo ID requirements — some accept certain types of IDs, and other states require other types — this would be a uniform requirement and override those. Also, a lot of Democratic-led states do not currently have voter ID laws, and this would implement them.

Eli: How is this looking at the state level? Because certain states, Florida for example, have tried to pass, or have passed quite similar bills. How many states have done that or are going to try before the midterms?

Nathaniel: That’s certainly where the real action is. If a state passes a law requiring documentary proof of citizenship, that is totally kosher — at least, you’d have to come up with a different legal argument to block it. I’m sure somebody will still file a lawsuit. In fact, I think they did in Florida. But there has been more movement on the state level.

Obviously, the blue states aren’t going to do anything. I believe there are four states that have enacted proof of citizenship laws just since the beginning of the year: Florida, South Dakota, Utah, and Mississippi. Going into the year, only three states had this policy: Arizona, New Hampshire, and Wyoming. So that is obviously a big change due to a movement that Trump has started. I should also note that none of these laws take effect until 2027. [Editor’s note: Rakich later clarified that only Florida’s law is delayed until 2027; the others take effect this year. See correction below.2] So that’s an important difference. The SAVE America Act would be effective immediately, and that is a big concern for election administrators. If they somehow abolish the filibuster tomorrow and pass this bill, election administrators would immediately need to start checking citizenship for newly registered voters. They don’t have the funding to do that. They don’t have the time to do that in addition to their regular duties preparing for the election.

Another way in which states have moved in the direction Trump wants is by changing absentee ballot receipt date deadlines. As part of the first executive order in 2025, Trump attempted to require all ballots to be in by Election Day. A lot of states — I believe it’s 14 — allow ballots to count if they arrive after Election Day, as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. That’s why in states like California the count takes a long time, because ballots are still coming in. Trump, in his first executive order, attempted to say no, every ballot is due on Election Day. That part was blocked in court. But there have been [several] Republican-led states that have said we are going to change our law from a postmark deadline to a receipt deadline since Trump entered office.

The other interesting thing is that Trump has said on Truth Social several times that we should get rid of mail ballots entirely. He has also said we should go totally to paper ballots and not use voting machines. Those are two things that even red states are not moving on at all. Vote-by-mail in general — and by that I mean no-excuse absentee voting — is popular. Polls show that even among Republicans, a decent chunk think voting by mail is fine. It’s popular among Republican politicians too. Campaign operatives know that it’s really helpful to be able to get mail ballots to people and track who has voted that way. So there is just no interest among Republicans to get rid of that voting method. And then there is an understanding that getting rid of voting machines would be an extremely costly and logistically daunting, if not impossible, task. So Republican states have quietly ignored that part of Trump’s request.

Eli: It’s also a speed and accuracy thing with voting machines, right?

Nathaniel: Yes. The Trumpy, platonic ideal is that everybody votes on a paper ballot and then those ballots are counted by hand. But a couple of municipalities have decided, in the wake of all this, to hand-count their ballots. It’s just a mess. It takes forever. It takes significantly longer than by machine. It’s less accurate. There’s a reason that we use voting machines to tally ballots.

Can Trump actually rig the midterms?

Eli: Obviously, with these measures we’ve been talking about — citizenship laws, vote-by-mail, absentee ballot receipt dates — there tends to be a partisan split. On one hand, there’s the “you want everyone who is eligible to vote to be able to vote” angle. But people also often talk about the partisan political dimension: is making it harder to vote going to benefit one party? The common understanding used to be that these laws will make it harder for Democrats to vote and advantage Republicans. Now lots of people talk about how that’s flipped, and actually, if you only allow people with a passport to vote, it’s going to be good for Democrats. What do you think of all that?

Nathaniel: It is not clear to me at all that these laws would hurt Democrats. I do think that is Trump’s expectation. He’s basically all but said, if you get rid of mail ballots and have voter ID, then Republicans will never lose another election. But I just don’t think the evidence is there. It’s highly uncertain. I think it’s important to have wide error bars on this.

But there are ways in which it hurts the Democratic coalition — people of color are less likely to have these documents. But those voters, especially Latinos, have been getting more Republican. In addition, older and rural voters are two groups who would be uniquely hurt by proof of citizenship requirements specifically. And then for rural voters, one thing that is underdiscussed about proof of citizenship requirements is that they would functionally eliminate the ability to register to vote by any method other than in person.

In most states, you can register to vote by sending in a form via the mail or do it online. Now, you could send those forms in, but before your registration was finalized you would still have to go to an elections office physically and show them your documents. For people in rural areas who might live a two-hour drive away from their county seat, that would be a real hassle. So it is not at all clear to me that these laws would have the partisan impacts that Trump hopes.

Eli: Whenever one of these executive orders comes out, you get a lot of Democrats who have this very cynical view of what all of this means: that this is Trump trying to take control of elections, and that he’s going to keep pushing. It goes anywhere from having ICE at polling places to straight-up canceling the midterms. As an observer, I tend to discount a lot of the most out-there stuff. How concerned should people be, if at all? Is there anything there to be taken seriously?

Nathaniel: There’s no question that Trump wants to involve the federal government in elections to a higher degree. That’s what the executive orders do. He’s also had the Department of Justice request voter rolls from every state except North Dakota, which doesn’t have voter rolls. DHS has also created or augmented an existing database called SAVE, which is essentially a database of people and their citizenship status. The Trump administration upgraded that system last year to be able to upload voter rolls in bulk. So several Republican-run states have given their data over to DHS to basically spit out a list of people who aren’t citizens.

The issue with that is there are a lot of false positives in the data, because the data that SAVE’s database relies on is unreliable. A state like Texas, for instance, got this data back from the federal government that said “here are all the non-citizens on your rolls’” The Secretary of State’s office told county clerks to get these people off the rolls. But when they went to check, a lot of those people were citizens. It’s important to note that states aren’t allowed to kick people off their rolls without notifying them, or at least giving them a chance to prove their citizenship. So it’s not as bad as it could have been — not mass voter purges — but the federal government is being used to at least try to take people off the voter rolls.

The worst-case scenarios are definitely more outlandish. Trump cannot cancel the midterms, full stop. He could issue an executive order tomorrow that said the midterm elections are hereby canceled, and they would still happen — both because the Constitution does not give the president the right to set election laws, and because the president has no role in administering the election. That is run on the state and local level by people who are a mix of Democrats, Republicans, and nonpartisan election officials, and they are almost uniformly — from all my conversations with them and our reporting — committed to doing the election. They are also all legally obligated to do the election. States have their own laws that they have to follow. So there is no chance that the midterms will be canceled.

The question of federal troops at polling places is a thornier example. That’s where you get into some uncharted waters. It is clearly illegal under federal law and a lot of state laws for armed troops or agents to go to polling places. But we don’t really know what would happen if Trump tried to do something like that. There’s also a chance that, for instance, ICE agents could conduct a bunch of raids in the neighborhood on Election Day — that’s not at polling places, so it conveniently goes around the prohibition. But obviously that’s something that might depress turnout, and could be considered interfering with the election. That is a concern. But the administration has said repeatedly that they are not going to send troops or ICE to polling places.

There was a concern earlier last year about National Guard troops. It’s also obviously worth noting the National Guard is under the control of the governor, and the courts have so far found, when he was deploying them, that if the governor doesn’t accede, then Trump can’t override that. But there are states with Republican governors. Greg Abbott in Texas, if that Senate race is tight, could he allow Trump to use the National Guard? Potentially. But it couldn’t happen in a state like Pennsylvania, where there’s a Democratic governor.

So there are a lot of legal and practical barriers between us and a situation where there are federal troops at polling places. But it is one of the bigger question marks, because even if you think it is unlikely — and I think it is unlikely — it’s not impossible. Obviously, if you’re an election official, you should be preparing for this scenario, even if there’s a 10 percent chance, because it would be a pretty bad scenario. If, for instance, National Guard troops impounded voting machines or ballot boxes, that raises questions about whether those ballots will be counted because the chain of custody is broken, which means you can’t ensure that they haven’t been tampered with.

The other thing I would say is that you can’t have a mass operation to do this. They’re not going to send National Guard troops to every polling place in Texas, because there just aren’t the numbers to do that. But could you have one instance in which a National Guard unit or a group of ICE agents is sent to one specific polling place in a Hispanic-heavy neighborhood and impounds the ballots? That would be bad enough, because it would interfere with the clean administration of the election and potentially throw out ballots of several dozens or hundreds of eligible voters. So it’s something worth being mildly worried about.

Eli: When you say mildly worried, if I had to press you and give you a scale of, say, one — normal election — to ten — canceled elections — where are you on that scale today?

Nathaniel: It’s somewhere in between. I think you should be at a one. That should be the default. Anything above a one is not good. I don’t want to give you a specific number. What I’m trying to communicate to people is that there are unusual things happening in this election with regard to federal interference, and there are potentially things that could happen that would be quite disruptive. But at the same time, it is unlikely that there will be anything on any kind of wide enough scale to reverse an election result. And certainly, the Democrats’ doomsday scenarios of a canceled midterm, or outright invalidating the election, are so far-fetched as to be not worth worrying about. But that doesn’t mean that the specific scenario I described of maybe 200 ballots getting thrown out in Arizona in a key House race — that is worth being concerned about in and of itself, even if it doesn’t signal the death of American democracy.

Eli: You mentioned talking to election officials, and them being almost uniformly committed to running the election normally. What has your experience been talking to them? I’d be curious about Democrats, and especially Republicans.

Nathaniel: Virtually all election officials are really good public servants who’ve been doing this for a long time and really want things to go smoothly. They don’t want any problems at polling places. These are local people. In many cases, they know their voters; they have personal relationships with their communities. Nobody wants to disenfranchise their own voters. So they are preparing for the election the same way that they always do. A lot of them are nervous and are hoping that none of these nightmare scenarios come to pass, but they are preparing for them. For the most part, they’re unfazed. They’d rather not have the executive orders looming over their heads, but they are getting ready to administer the elections the same way they always have.

Eli: The two executive orders are probably going to be held up in court, the SAVE Act probably not going to pass. Is there any chatter about anything else coming down the pipeline between now and the midterms?

Nathaniel: At the signing ceremony of the executive order last week, Trump made a comment that was basically like, “We’re still working on the citizenship issue” — it’s not clear whether he was referring to the SAVE America Act or whether he was saying that they’re going to do another executive order. It is definitely up in the air that there could be another executive order. Executive orders are ultimately going to be a fruitless way to make any changes to the election. But the closer you do it to the election, the more nervous it makes people, and the more potential there is to at least confuse people about the rules.

Eli: What are you going to be paying attention to, election administration-wise, heading into the midterms?

Nathaniel: Certainly making sure we keep an eye on the executive orders and the SAVE America Act. I don’t expect anything to happen there, but you never know. There are two important voting cases in front of the Supreme Court right now. One is about whether ballots can arrive after Election Day. Basically the argument there is that Election Day is Election Day, and any ballots that come in after that have missed a deadline. If the Supreme Court agrees, then those 14 states that still have postmark deadlines would change. That would be a fairly significant change, especially for a state like California. The other case threatens to overturn the Voting Rights Act. At this point it is too late to materially affect the 2026 midterms. But if the Voting Rights Act is indeed overturned, that would lead to widespread, probably nationwide redistricting before 2028 that would eliminate a lot of majority-minority districts, especially in the South, which tend to benefit Democrats.

Otherwise, we’re going to have to see how aggressively Trump tries to interfere with the administration of the election in the fall. And then we’ll see to what extent the results are legally challenged. The 2020 election was challenged on extremely dubious grounds, and it was a concern for democracy, culminating in January 6. But at the same time, the system held. I would expect the same to be the case here. The only concerning scenario is if Democrats do a lot worse than they think they’re going to do, and the House comes down to one or two seats, and then those seats are really tight. Any close election is subject to litigation, and there could be recounts, and the validity of every ballot gets scrutinized. That’s always a concern if the election is super close, but that is such a specific scenario that I don’t think it’s worth worrying too much about. But it’s something I’ll be keeping an eye on.

As I wrote after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, we struggle with how to cover this sort of political violence at Silver Bulletin. On the one hand, these stories don’t really play into our expertise. And “takes” in the immediate aftermath of these events are notorious for relying on incomplete or inaccurate information and otherwise “not aging well”. On the other hand, it’s an objectively important political story — it would have felt weird to publish the story we were originally planning for today (a good politics story but not time-sensitive) as though nothing had happened over the weekend. And to some extent, the premise of any good blog is in having access to the author’s thought process while events are still in progress.

So I compromised by talking it out with Eli, who was attending the Substack New Media Party near the White House2 when the WHCD incident went down. You can find the video above. (Note that there are a few minutes of dead space at the end.) As much as I’m trying not to write a long, complicated essay about this, there were basically two points that I kept returning to in our conversation.

People shrugged this off, but it’s not a good sign if this feels “normal”

How one experiences breaking news depends on one’s circumstances. On Saturday night, I was in kind of a zone trying to get our soccer/World Cup model over the finish line. And uncharacteristically, I wasn’t really checking my phone. By the time I learned about the WHCD incident, the danger seemed to have passed.3

I know from friends how harrowing the experience was if you were actually at the Washington Hilton. But as Eli says, otherwise the show pretty much went on. (Including at the Substack party, where guests were literally locked in for some period of time.)

On Twitter, people were continuing their usual conversations about the NBA playoffs and the red and blue button4 and whatever else. Roughly two or three times a year, there’s a political event that stops the world in its tracks, where writing about anything else would seem “tone deaf”. Both the assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania in 2024 and the Kirk assassination fell into that category. Based on the social media vibes, Saturday night didn’t feel the same way — even though the events unfolded at the literal epicenter of media and political power.

And maybe that’s … not great. I never want to tell people what they should or shouldn’t care about or critique their emotional reactions. But an assassination attempt against the president of the United States is the very definition of a major political story. And the fact that this sort of thing is happening more often is a reason to feel more worried, not more complacent because you narrowly averted disaster. If your next-door neighbor drives home drunk every Friday and has knocked down every other mailbox on your block at some point, your conclusion shouldn’t be that he’s a great driver because he’s avoided worse.

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One can debate exactly how close Allen got — he’d checked in as a guest at the Hilton, and his manifesto trolled the Secret Service. But multiple layers of security exist for a reason, and he was stopped. It wasn’t Butler, where a bullet literally hit/grazed5 the president’s ear.

Still, one theme in studying low-probability events is that near-misses are informative. A candidate who loses an election by 100 votes in what would have been a huge upset — well, for forecasting future elections, that tells you basically the same thing as if she’d won by 100 votes.

Saturday night could easily have been much worse. So, obviously, could Butler. So could January 6 but for the bravery of the Capitol Police. The lesson we should take from these events shouldn’t be “usually, everything turns out OK”. It should be that the nation is constantly flirting with disaster.

Rationalization, minimization and denialism

Here are a couple of points I’m specifically not making:

• I don’t particularly care whether the left or the right is “worse” at stochastic political violence in America in 2026. It isn’t a race you want to win. Or if it is a race, it’s a race to the bottom. The fact that I can rattle off from memory a half-dozen recent violent incidents with Republican or right-coded targets and another half-dozen with Democratic or left-coded targets … in either case, that’s way too many.

• I’m not into language policing. Lots of common idioms involve gun metaphors or other violent imagery (“the CFO had a target on his back”). Actually, most people understand metaphors and have a lot of experience distinguishing figurative from literal speech. I’m also not much into tone policing. I don’t think people should feel any obligation to express outrage or “thoughts and prayers” especially when it isn’t sincere. You don’t have to say something about every terrible thing.

Rather, what I object to are substantive rationalizations of political violence. Few “respectable” people do this outright. Instead, as Eli and I discussed, it usually comes in the form of “yeah, buts”. One classic example of a “yeah, but” is U.S. Senator Chris Murphy after Luigi Mangione’s murder of a health care CEO:

Listen, I’m never going to condone violence. I don’t here. I spent my entire life fighting gun violence because I know that the devastation is enormous. ... What I see happening in this country, though, is a real visceral anger that the outrage at Brian Thompson’s death or the outrage at the death of any powerful person isn’t matched by the anger over the thousands of people who die often anonymous deaths every single day in this country at the hands of a healthcare industry that mostly doesn’t give a s--- about people and only cares about profits.

Let me be precise here: I definitely don’t think that Murphy is condoning or endorsing Brian Thompson’s murder. But he’s providing a rationalization for Luigi. And his preamble doesn’t change that much. If you tell your waiter “no offense, but this is the worst meal I’ve ever had, and your service stunk too”, the waiter is within his rights to take offense. If you’re yeah-butting, the “yeah” doesn’t give you immunity for what happens after the “but”.

The other main technique is denial. I wouldn’t say it’s super pervasive, but I’ve been surprised at the number of semi-respectable Democratic-leaning commentators who have flirted with the idea that Butler was a “false flag” or that Saturday night was. Another form of denial is to misinform your audience about the identity of the shooter or his motivations: sure this was bad but our side didn’t do it. I was very disappointed by Heather Cox Richardson, for example, when she implied that Tyler Robinson, Charlie Kirk’s assassin, was a right-wing MAGA Groyper, and did nothing to correct the record when it became clear that he obviously wasn’t.

Somewhere in between denial and rationalization is minimization. The most common form of this is the other side is worse or just as bad. Alternatively, you can minimize the larger argument by foregrounding irrelevant details. There are just so many times when I’ll see someone trying to score some narrow political point in the wake of a tragedy or near-tragedy. They probably think they’re being persuasive, but it’s a reliable sign that they’re not worth listening to the next time around.

Yesterday, Virginia voters approved a referendum that would give Democrats partisan control of the state’s redistricting process, removing it from a bipartisan commission. Barring court challenges, the new districts will take effect for this November’s midterms, with Democrats favored in 10 of Virginia’s 11 districts, creating the possibility for a 4-seat gain over the current 6-5 delegation. (Although Democrats might have picked up one seat anyway, given what’s likely to be a favorable environment.)

Some of the districts are pretty jagged, as is typically the case when parties get to draw their own maps:

The new map is not totally without downside risk for Democrats. Five of the state’s districts were carried by Kamala Harris by single digits, leaving Dem incumbents vulnerable in a Republican wave year or should Virginia revert to being more purple.

But the reward is worth it. Axios estimates that Democrats have actually gained ground from the mid-decade redistricting war that began in Texas. And Kyle Kondik calculates that the map that will be contested in November is almost perfectly fair.

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There are still court decisions left in a few states, and our model will provide a more precise version of this calculation once it launches — it wouldn’t shock me if the map winds up slightly favoring Democrats.1 Still, if Democrats win the popular vote for the House by any margin (and they probably will) they’re very likely to take control of the chamber.

Nobody likes I-told-you-so’s, but … well … here’s what I wrote in August:

That column pointed out that if both parties took a truly maximalist approach to redistricting, it might actually work to Democrats’ benefit. Although Republicans have a gubernatorial/legislative trifecta in more states, Democrats’ trifectas are in more populous states. So once Abigail Spanberger flipped Virginia’s governorship in November, Democrats inherited trifecta control over a larger number of Congressional seats:

Another part of my theory was that Democrats tend to turn out in bigger numbers than Republicans for any sort of special election like the one in Virginia yesterday, which makes the party more nimble if districts are constantly being rejiggered.

The Virginia margin was underwhelming, but the result was still impressive

But here’s some grist for the Nate haters: in Virginia, part of my “I told you so” deserves a demerit. As Patrick Ruffini points out, turnout was actually higher yesterday in red-leaning counties where voters are understandably concerned about losing their representation in Congress to gerrymandered districts.

It wasn’t enough to carry the day, though: “yes” won by 3 points. (Results aren’t official yet.)

One could argue that the margin was a little underwhelming. Harris won Virginia by 6 points in 2024 in a mediocre electoral environment for Democrats; “yes” won by 3 with Trump’s approval rating at 38.8 percent and falling. There were a few voters like Virginia resident and friend-of-the-newsletter Matt Glassman who voted “no” on principle.

Indeed, yesterday’s result may come to represent the upper bound for how far Democrats are willing to push things. In a slightly more purple state or in a slightly more red-leaning political environment, the referendum might have failed. And Spanberger’s downside is protected because governors in Virginia are limited to one consecutive term. Change any of those factors, and I’m not sure you’re going to see governors pushing for this. I wouldn’t expect Michigan’s Jocelyn Benson to campaign for partisan districts in that state should she and Democrats win a trifecta there later this year, for instance.

On the other hand, this is a pretty damned impressive display of partisan coordination. Less than a decade ago, polls showed Democrats opposed to gerrymandering by 2:1 margins — note that Republicans were opposed to it by almost as wide a margin. And one of Barack Obama’s and Eric Holder’s big post-presidency projects was to fight for “fair maps”, which used to mean opposing gerrymandering and partisan control over districting.

Obama urged Virginians to vote yes, however.

Is this hypocritical? Yeah, kind of. But I’d like to play a tune from the world’s tiniest violin for Republicans who are crying foul about all of this. Gerrymandering goes back to the early days of the republic, and mid-decade redistricting is basically a Republican invention upheld by Republican-friendly courts. The recent lineage goes back to Texas — but actually Texas in 2003 under Rick Perry and Tom DeLay rather than last year.

Democrats solved for the equilibrium

Personally, I think having fewer competitive seats and less representative districts is pernicious to representative government. But I don’t think something like Virginia is a particularly close call.

It’s completely obvious that you can’t have unilateral disarmament, and some measure of credit should go to Gavin Newsom (not usually my favorite politician) who kicked things off by fighting back instead of just complaining.

Democrats in Virginia understood what was at stake. The county-by-county margins were almost perfectly aligned with the 2024 presidential vote:

The closest thing to an exception was in the Northern Virginia counties shown in dark blue. These are home to the canonical “high-information” voters, with many residents who work for the federal government or government contractors. These counties were generally above both trendlines, meaning that in some suburban DC counties like Fairfax and Loudoun, the yes margin actually beat Harris’s over Trump last year.

Yes, consuming lots of political news often correlates with being highly partisan, but this is one case where naked partisanship helped steer Democrats in a more strategically optimal direction.

Perhaps because my degree was in economics, because I play a lot of games — OK, really just poker, but I play a lot of poker — and because I’ve spent a lot of time covering highly competitive environments like sports, my brain tends to want to “solve for the equilibrium”. If one “player” in the game makes a move, I assume that the other party will reciprocate by employing roughly their most self-interested strategy according to the tenets of game theory.

That doesn’t always yield flawless predictions about political behavior. If Democrats were perfectly rational, they’d probably have nominated someone other than Harris (although she was a big improvement over Joe Biden). And it’s hard to understand what Trump has gotten politically or otherwise from starting a war with Iran.

But when the incentives are simple and straightforward, voters usually behave rationally. And a democratic system — even a competitive authoritarian system like Hungary — is often a resilient way to express those preferences.

Don’t like this? Ask Congress for help.

In game theory terms, redistricting is a classic prisoner’s dilemma. The rational move is to “defect” and screw over your “partner” unless you have some means of coordination or cooperation. What most people don’t understand about the prisoner’s dilemma, though, is that it’s not a zero-sum game: the prisoners would be better off if they could trust one another. But if they can’t, it’s every man for himself.

I think it goes without saying that even if Republicans “started it”, we’re locked into a race-to-the-bottom now given extraordinarily high levels of partisanship. In this cycle’s redistricting wars, there have been a few pockets of resistance: Indiana for Republicans and Maryland for Democrats. And there are a few voters like Glassman who will take a principled stance.

But not many. If the parties can’t trust one another, Texas and Virginia are what you’re going to get until and unless there is some enforceable means of coordination.

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And that means regulation. It’s not going to come from the Supreme Court, or at least anything resembling SCOTUS’s current construction. In 2019, with Ruth Bader Ginsburg still on the court, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in the Rucho vs. Common Cause decision that control of districting was a “political question” — in other words, up to Congress.

I don’t think it’s completely crazy to think that bipartisan legislation on redistricting could someday pass Congress. In the abstract, gerrymandering is still quite unpopular with voters. It might grow more unpopular when voters in Texas and Virginia realize in November that their longstanding member of Congress has been displaced because districts have been changed and they’re now represented by someone in a completely different part of the state.

Furthermore, it ought to be unpopular with current elected officials, since they’re often unseated by aggressive redistricting.

But it’s tough. You need a system that 1) both parties agree is roughly fair, 2) that will withstand legal scrutiny and 3) doesn’t have too many loopholes.

It’s honestly the kind of problem that some sort of bipartisan good government group might want to get to work on, understanding that partisanship will probably have to retreat from its current levels before some sort of solution is actionable. And while I’m more optimistic than most pundits about the future of American democracy, I’m not asking to volunteer.

A few weeks after Donald Trump’s second presidential win, I took the train up from London (where I was living at the time) to Oxford to attend a conference on polls and forecasts of the 2024 election. Most of the attendees were pollsters or academics, but I also watched presentations from Aaru and Electric Twin, two companies that do what is interchangeably called synthetic sampling, silicon sampling, or creating synthetic audiences. Sans startup jargon, that means they use large language models (LLMs) to simulate responses to public opinion polls by having AI agents take on the role of survey respondents.

I had already heard of Aaru thanks to some articles with eye-catching headlines like “No people, no problem: AI chatbots predict elections better than humans” in the months leading up to Election Day. The guys behind the company were making some big, some might even say far-fetched claims, such as: “within two years, we will simulate the entire globe — from the way crops are grown in Ukraine to how that impacts production of oil in Iraq, trade through the strait of Malacca, and elections for the mayor of Baltimore.” When Semafor asked Aaru’s cofounders — Cameron Fink and Ned Koh — about my boss, they said “we respect all those who came before us.” Nate (as he so often does) shared his thoughts on Twitter:

Fink and Koh were relatively good-natured about this back-and-forth when we spoke at Oxford. They even offered to mail me one of the t-shirts featuring Nate’s quote they apparently had made. I never took them up on the offer, which I now somewhat regret.

These synthetic sampling companies fell off my radar for a while, but they do still exist. In fact, Aaru recently received a $1 billion valuation. Is what they’re doing anywhere close to the most important frontier in AI development? Not by a longshot, especially when Anthropic just developed a model so adept at exploiting software vulnerabilities that it’s only being released to 40 companies.

Still, silicon sampling is increasingly finding its way into public polling. Axios reported in March that “a majority of people trust their own doctors and nurses” based on findings from Aaru — without mentioning that the “people” in that sentence were actually LLMs. Around the same time, the Public Sentiment Institute “boosted” their online sample of 373 real survey respondents with 114 AI agents.1 (Spoiler alert: even the co-founder of Electric Twin doesn’t think that’s a particularly defensible approach.) Polling companies like Qualtrics and Ipsos are also developing synthetic data panels.

So, what should we make of these … “polls”? Let’s get one thing out of the way: whatever they are, they’re not polls in the way that term is usually defined.

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You can’t replace polls with AI

On one hand, using LLMs to essentially make up fake survey respondents sort of sounds like the dumbest idea ever, one that will only imperfectly replicate real polls while introducing all sorts of biases. On the other hand, with LLMs improving at a remarkable, perhaps even alarming rate, maybe I’m a dinosaur at the ripe old age of 24 because I still want to rely on polls that talk to actual people.

I’m not going to argue that synthetic samples are completely useless. In fact, as I’ll return to later, there is evidence that some techniques can replicate topline survey results quickly and cheaply. But the marketing from certain companies can be slightly optimistic. “No traditional poll will exist by the time the next general election occurs,” said Fink in 2024. We’re just 206 days away from the midterms, and based on the fact that I still have to collect a bunch of polls every day, I’d say he should have run that prediction by a sample of AI agents before the interview.2

To see why synthetic samples can’t replace polls, here’s a quick primer on how they work. The simplest version of these models involves taking a LLM (like ChatGPT or Claude), giving it a demographic profile (e.g., a white, college-educated woman who lives in Utah and makes $70k a year), and then asking it to respond to a survey question. You repeat that process a few thousand times using different demographic profiles and end up with a sample of synthetic survey responses.

The actual models used by private companies are more sophisticated than this, usually because they incorporate more demographic characteristics for each agent and provide them with extra information. Aaru, for example, feeds agents a diet of news and information they’d be likely to consume, while Electric Twin incorporates their customers’ proprietary data about the audience they’re trying to replicate. The way Ben Warner, the co-founder of Electric Twin, explained it to me was “we have a large amount of data on… for instance, 5,000 people. Can we make an accurate prediction of how they would respond to another question?”

Still, without any reference to cost, speed, or accuracy, it should be obvious why synthetic samples can’t replace polls. Polling is fundamentally a data collection process. We might use surveys to make predictions by feeding them into election forecasts, but the main purpose of a poll isn’t prediction, it’s gathering new data about what people think and how they feel. Silicon sampling, on the other hand, produces no new data. It’s simply a model: you input LLM training data, demographic prompts, and a bunch of other information, and it spits out a prediction for what a poll would say.

We love models here, but models aren’t polls. That difference is an important philosophical sticking point for most pollsters I talk to. “I think politics should stay away from [synthetic sampling], because we’re trying to… represent the voice of the people,” said Natalie Jackson, a vice president at GQR Insights. Democratic pollster John Hagner told me “I think I’m just incredibly skeptical of this idea. I don’t think it’s research. At that point, you’re asking the machine to tell you what you already believe.” Hagner has seen some presentations of early synthetic sampling experiments, but so far, “if it’s being used in a campaign, people are keeping it incredibly quiet.”3

But Eli, I hear you saying, aren’t polls themselves increasingly governed by modeling decisions? Indeed they are: pollsters’ choices on which sampling method to use, how to define their likely voter models, and how to weight their samples can and do lead to dramatic differences in the results they publish. Aaru even referenced these limitations in the methodology statement included with that maternal mortality “poll” — although I’m using the term “methodology statement” loosely here, because it doesn’t really explain how the model works at all.

We can ignore the (frankly preposterous) implication that synthetic sampling isn’t subject to a separate set of biases. The important point is that there’s still a meaningful difference between using weighting and other statistical techniques on actual polling data and using a model to predict what a poll would say. The latter is far closer to election forecasts or techniques like MRP — potentially useful models, but not a replacement for polls.4

To be fair, other synthetic sampling companies are perfectly happy with the distinction between polls and models. Warner compared polling and synthetic sampling to different tools in a toolbox. “The mistake I think we make is we think that these new tools should either work in exactly the same way or somehow replace these old tools,” he said. “Rather than thinking of it as, okay, so we’ve always had the hammer, we’ve always had the screwdriver, now we’ve got a saw. But don’t use a saw to try [to] do the job of a hammer.”

Are these models any good?

If synthetic surveys are just a new type of model, the next obvious question is whether the models are at least accurate. The answer to that question depends very much on who you ask.

On one end of the spectrum, you have the maximalist argument that synthetic sampling is better and more accurate than actual polls. “It’s an incredibly challenging problem to go to someone and say ‘hey, we’re going to be more accurate at predicting human behavior than you, even when you talk to your customers directly,” Koh recently told CNBC. In his view, synthetic sampling isn’t a saw to polling’s hammer, it’s “magic.”

There’s certainly evidence that synthetic samples can replicate certain survey toplines. But if Aaru does have any examples of their approach outperforming the polls, they’re keeping those to themselves.5 Aaru’s 2024 election model, for example, had Kamala Harris leading in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin on November 4th. And although they’ve since taken down their forecast page, they gave Harris a 50.5 percent chance of winning the race on November 2nd.6

After the election, Fink told Semafor he was happy enough with those results because they were “within margin of error,” a term that is meaningless when applied to a “sample” of AI agents. And of course, Aaru says their models have improved since 2024, so supposedly now they’d be more accurate than the polls? Still, their stronger argument is on cost: “We are significantly faster and cheaper than traditional polling, and still more accurate,” said Fink. The first two claims there are undeniably true, but the third brings us to the opposite end of the spectrum.

Both Jackson and Hagner are skeptical that these models are reliable for anything far beyond replicating common survey toplines. “I just… don’t think the machines are what we want when we’re looking for nuanced views. My example on this is people in Arizona and Nevada in 2024 who voted for Trump and voted for expanding abortion in their states on ballot initiatives,” said Jackson. Hagner identified a similar issue: “the reports that have come through at the meetings that I’ve been at are that the early experiments on this, they cannot get respondents to be as racist or sexist or, frankly, as negative as human respondents.”

Academic research mostly agrees on this point. While there are some papers that show promising results when using LLMs to replicate polling data, most show that LLMs suffer from various quirks like producing too few “don’t know” responses and can seriously overpredict the favorability of politicians like Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. They also seem to struggle with too little variation between demographic subgroups, so the difference in predicted opinion between Democrats and Republicans, for example, is too small.

When I asked Warner about these studies, his response to these papers was that just because academics can’t get synthetic sampling to work doesn’t mean that the technique doesn’t work in general. “Actually, the argument is, okay, yours does not [work]. That does not mean […] for this complex set of machinery, which uses a lot of investment, a lot of time, a lot of money, you can’t get it to work.”

Cards on the table, I’m somewhat sympathetic to this argument because academics aren’t exactly great at making election forecasts. Usually, the people with skin in the game are the most accurate. Warner’s argument is that the approach Electric Twin takes — which includes, for example, making multiple predictions for each synthetic respondent using different models and prompts and subsequently averaging those to get a final prediction like a sort of ensemble forecast — produces better results than the simpler academic models.

Warner shared a comparison between his method and the method from a recent academic paper with me, and Electric Twin was indeed able to get more accurate replication. But even still, he acknowledged that synthetic sampling “is not a crystal ball.” “If you asked me, do I think using other data sources will be more accurate than asking somebody who they will vote for, I would probably say no. But if you asked me ‘would your system be useful for our turnout modeling today?’ I would say yes.”

But for better or worse, it looks like the method is already getting more popular in the market research world. Most of the clients Aaru talks about these days are businesses like EY and McDonald’s.

That’s not to say AI won’t pop up in other parts of the political polling process. Pollsters are already using it to code open-ended survey responses, and some firms, like YouGov, are testing using LLMs to ask survey respondents questions.

More worryingly, one danger to actual polls is that AI agents can be used to infiltrate online surveys. Most online polls use various checks to prevent that from happening, but there’s conflicting evidence on how effective those filters are and how prevalent AI agents currently are in online panels. If those agents ever become impossible to detect, it might spell the end of online polling, but the solution isn’t to replace all of your respondents with ChatGPT.

I’m not super eager to talk about military strategy as opposed to the political implications of the war with Iran. But as someone with some expertise in strategy and game theory generally, I suppose I’d like to make a quick point here.

Over the past few days, President Trump had been making some extremely escalatory threats toward Iran. On Easter Sunday at 8 a.m., he wrote the following on Truth Social:

And then on Tuesday morning, Trump doubled down, claiming that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran didn’t make some effort to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by 8 p.m. last night:

I didn’t want to put this idea out into the ether with a glib tweet or something until we got through last night, but this was, in my view, a not-so-thinly veiled nuclear threat. It was a little bit ambiguous, but nuclear threats usually are. And it wasn’t exactly that subtle. I mean, Trump literally said “a whole civilization will die tonight” and that this was “one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World”. Whether it was a credible threat was another matter. But I clearly wasn’t the only one who was thinking about the potentially existential stakes. Here was Garrett Graff, from the appropriately named newsletter Doomsday Scenario:

Is the chance that tomorrow at 8 pm ET Donald Trump launches nuclear weapons against Iran zero? Definitely not — and, regardless of whether that’s a one-tenth-of-one-percent chance or two percent or eight percent, anything more than zero is too high. I’d personally put the chance that Donald Trump uses a nuclear weapon against Iran at some point in the three percent range — which is a stunningly high number, given the history of nuclear weapons and the presidency.

I have no idea whether Graff’s estimate of a 3 percent chance of a nuclear strike against Iran was in the right ballpark or even how you’d go about calibrating such a forecast. But I don’t think Graff’s take was “alarmist”. There were really three scenarios: 1) Iran would back down; 2) Iran wouldn’t back down, but Trump would chicken out anyway; 3) Iran wouldn’t back down, and Trump would follow through on his threat.

I’m not sure whether we just experienced Scenario #1 or Scenario #2. But even if we had wound up in Scenario #3, a massive assault through conventional weapons was probably more likely than the literal nuclear option. And maybe if Trump had ordered a nuclear attack — or even something short of that — people in the chain of command would have regarded it as an unlawful order, refused to carry it out, and we’d be in some sort of constitutional crisis.

Even though we have pulled back from the brink — a two-week ceasefire was announced 90 minutes before the deadline — nuclear escalation had entered the realm of the thinkable, and that’s bad enough. I’ll tell you this much: I wasn’t eager to make plans last night.

I have a lot of respect for the intelligence and integrity of people who work in the military (not one of my more lib-coded characteristics). But Pete Hegseth has been firing senior commanders. He’s notoriously erratic and unqualified to lead the Department of Defense.

You shouldn’t feel too relieved

Sometimes, there’s an element of “heads I win, tails you lose” in media coverage of President Trump. He makes some sort of threat that every reasonable person thinks is a bad idea, and then he backs down. So he’ll be (appropriately) criticized if he follows through, but also criticized for chickening out.

Usually, it’s OK to feel some sense of relief when the worst consequences are avoided.

My point is this: I don’t think this is one of those times when you should feel particularly relieved. In fact, I think it’s pretty fucking irresponsible to either celebrate Trump’s strategic genius or troll him for TACO’ing.

Yes, a ceasefire is much, much, much better than the alternatives. No, I don’t know how long it will hold. Nor do I know how much Trump backed down as compared to Iran.

But this certainly isn’t some sort of 13-dimensional genius move. It reflects an unchecked Commander-in-Chief who was erratic on his best days, who is 79 years old, who was boxed into a corner, who has sycophantic advisors who are mostly too afraid to challenge him, and who once bragged that he could maintain approval from his base even if he murdered someone.

States with nuclear weapons have the ability to make a lot of bluffs. The expected value of a 3 percent chance of an infinitely bad outcome is still negative infinity. That’s why many countries, including, of course, Iran, have pursued the bomb.

And it probably does help Trump in some ways that he could be plausibly considered an irrational actor under “Madman Theory”, the term popularized by Richard Nixon. I doubt that a President Romney or President Haley or President Biden or President Harris or President Ocasio-Cortez would have used the same rhetoric, but if they had, it would have read differently.

There were, however, various ways this could have gone very badly, or still could go very badly the next time the “game” is played, and inevitably will go badly if we repeat the scenario often enough:

1. Even if he wasn’t eager to launch a nuclear attack, Trump could feel like he’d be humiliated or would lose credibility if he didn’t follow through. And having a reputation for chickening out might make those impulses worse.

2. Iran could have concluded the threat was empty — with the same overconfidence I’m seeing elsewhere tonight — when it wasn’t.

3. Even if Iran took the threat somewhat seriously, we don’t have a lot of evidence on how real human beings behave in scenarios like these. But there’s a pretty rich literature on how humans react very negatively to coercion and ultimatums and often seek revenge. Iran is also a literally decapitated regime — it’s not clear exactly who’s in charge — and might figure it didn’t have a hell of a lot to lose. And who knows about any political or religious motivations.

4. Even if nobody wanted further escalation, there’s inherently some risk in the fog of war. (See also: Thomas Schelling’s “Threat That Leaves Something To Chance”.) Some American sub-commander could have gotten his signals crossed, misinterpreted an order, or gone YOLO. Iran could have launched some sort of preemptive attack against American interests or against Israel (also a nuclear-armed state), and somebody might have panicked.

I’m not in the mood to get cute about this, so I’ll save the requisite poker analogy for the footnotes.1 But you don’t need to be some sort of game theory maven to appreciate that the small chance of a catastrophic outcome can outweigh the overwhelmingly likely but less than 100 percent chance of a trivial gain. And you need to understand that there can be some dangerous self-reinforcement from making “plays” like this because they almost always work. If you’re tempted to show the bluff and sit there with a smug smile on your face — “haha, suckers!” — that’s even worse because people will take you less seriously the next time around.

You do not want to play this game repeatedly. Nuclear weapons haven’t been around that long, and since Nagasaki, the world has been closer to the brink of nuclear weapons being used in combat than most people realize.

We mostly talked Trump and Iran. But my post on the decaying state of social media yesterday really touched a nerve over on X, so we discussed that at the top too.

It’s always telling when people…

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The last time I did a check-in on President Trump’s popularity in November, I noted that the decline in his approval ratings had been remarkably linear. There have been peaks and valleys, sure, which you can correlate with particular news events. But the recovery after every bounce-back has been incomplete, leaving some permanent damage behind.

So what’s happened since then? Well, let’s just go ahead and update that chart.

Obviously, the trend is still down. To be fair, his numbers were relatively flat between November and March.1 But Trump just hit a new low in our tracking. For the first time in his second term, Trump’s approval rating in our average is (just barely) below 40 percent at 39.7. And his net approval rating is -17.4, also a new low. The recent decline has been pretty steep: about 5 points of net approval over the past several weeks.

From a political standpoint, the most important events since November are probably the killing of two American citizens by border agents in Minneapolis in January, and then, of course, the Iran War, which began on Feb. 28.2 The effect of Minneapolis on Trump’s topline numbers is more debatable. Trump’s ratings have declined on immigration, and the government’s conduct in Minneapolis was deeply unpopular with swing voters. Immigration and “border security” remain just about the only issues where Trump’s ratings remain close to breakeven, however.

Iran has had a much clearer impact. So far, though, it’s probably less about the war itself than about the impact on gas prices, which are now at about $4 nationally, having risen by more than a dollar over the past month.

It’s still the economy, stupid

The start of the war did not produce a traditional rally-around-the-flag effect, but it also didn’t seem to immediately hurt Trump’s topline numbers. We’ve started publishing an Iran poll tracker, and it finds that net approval for the war is -15.3. So it’s unpopular, notably unlike other recent conflicts that began with more public support, but no more unpopular than Trump himself.

It was, however, about a week into the war when markets started to freak out over the likelihood of a prolonged disruption to oil shipments in the Persian Gulf. Here is the effect on prices at the pump:

Gas prices are likely to a sore point for a president who won an election largely on inflation. In 2024, 40 percent of voters in the exit poll said that “high prices for gas, groceries and other goods” was the single most important factor deciding their vote, and they broke 2:1 for Trump. It would be hard to pick a more visible indicator of affordability.3

Although there’s also the stock market. With its ubiquity on TV tickers, it’s closer to underrated than overrated as a measure of overall “vibes”. If you’re checking your 401K (and more Americans are than usual this time of year because it’s tax season), you’ll find that your wealth has declined by a chunk.

We saw some similar effects during the government shutdown. As Democrats struggled to craft the right message, Trump’s numbers actually improved during the early days of the shutdown. But they began to decline right when the White House threatened people’s SNAP benefits. As much as political discourse on social media can be centered on abstract, “post-material”, “culture war” issues, these debates occur mostly among people who are already strong partisans and who aren’t likely to have their overall opinion about Trump changed much in either direction. It’s when people’s pocketbooks are affected or their daily lives are disrupted that broader public opinion tends to change.

Trump will bounce back, right? Well, that’s not so clear.

So far, however poor, Trump’s approval ratings remain within the range of other recent presidencies. Biden bottomed out at a -20.5 on July 4, 2024 (after his debate with Trump but before he dropped out). Trump’s first-term low was -20.8 on Aug. 6, 2017; he also hit a -19.1 a week or two after the events of January 6, 2021. Even Obama had some rough stretches, hitting his all-time low of -13.2 on Nov. 18, 2013.

There’s no reason to doubt that the extreme political polarization puts a cap on a modern president’s approval ceiling — and probably also raises his floor. And yet, when I look back on that chart of Trump’s numbers, here’s what I’m struck by: so many of these political wounds have been self-inflicted.

In fact, you could argue that he’s actually been lucky not to have more problems. There haven’t been a lot of natural disasters during Trump 2.0, or major wars (like Ukraine or Gaza) breaking out that Trump didn’t start himself. The biggest economic shocks have also been Trump-caused: the tariffs last year, and now the oil shock. Meanwhile, he’s benefited from the boom in AI investment that has helped to keep tech stocks afloat, without which we might be in full-on bear market.

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Now that our NCAA tournament forecasts are out — please go check them out for men and for women — I’ll have a little more time over the next few weeks to catch up on the news and some other stories that are half-finished in the drafts folder. But we’re also well overdue for the March SBSQ. There’s still time to submit questions in the comments of last month’s post.

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I’m obviously not privy to President Trump’s thinking on why he decided to go to war with Iran.1 But even among well-connected reporters, there seem to be conflicting accounts on whether the White House and the Department of War anticipated that Iran would seek to effectively block shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, causing oil and gas prices to spike. (Though it’s hard to think they were totally unaware, given that this has been a well-known consequence of attacking Iran since my high school debate days.)

But maybe it’s as simple as this. Trump is a man who has faced remarkably few consequences for his own actions. It’s easier to do what you “feel in your bones” when you don’t bear the downside risks.

Trump has usually gotten away with it

“When you’re a star, they let you do it” has basically been Trump’s superpower. For instance, his strategy of telling off the entire Republican establishment in 2016 actually proved popular with GOP primary voters, defying the conventional wisdom from idiots like me who claimed the primaries are mostly about building intraparty consensus. Then he won the general election when polls had him losing.

Not only were there no real legal consequences to Trump from January 6, but he actually got re-elected four years later! (And everyone seemed to have forgotten about his mishandling of COVID.2) Meanwhile, in the second term, being a lame duck has arguably been freeing for Trump. It will probably be bad for Republicans at the midterms, but Trump has never seemed to particularly care how other Republicans fare when he’s not on the ballot himself.

On the foreign policy front, Trump didn’t face any particularly adverse consequences for nabbing Nicolas Maduro under cover of night. On domestic policy, the Supreme Court sometimes bails him out.

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Indeed, “you can just do things” is often a sound approach when you’re playing on a low difficulty level. In poker, we’d call this an exploitative strategy. Game theory will tell you that, if your opponent is playing optimally, you have to make some effort to balance and disguise your strategy. You can’t always bluff or the other guy will wise up. But some guys do always fold.3

And if we’re being honest, Democrats are often like that player who falls for the same trick every time. (I mean, this is literally a party that might nominate fellow Californian and electoral underperformer Gavin Newsom four years after Kamala Harris’s loss.) Furthermore, there’s some degree of context collapse in what news stories draw sustained public attention. The sense one gets is that there’s always a rising tone, an escalating crisis, whether or not that’s actually the case. Breathless coverage of inconsequential stories4 blow out the speakers for when there’s a story that should truly raise alarms like war in the Middle East.

The game theory of market behavior isn’t well-resolved

“Markets” sometimes provide more discipline to Trump, whether because of his personal financial interests or because he watches a lot of TV and red downward arrows don’t look pretty on the screen. But I put “markets” in scare quotes because I’ve struggled in this newsletter to operationalize how this actually works in practice:

Wednesday evening’s headlines after the bump in the market were full of happy talk about the “Trump put”. But the celebratory tone already looks premature. The term is borrowed from options trading — a “put” is an option to sell5 a stock at a specified price that’s typically lower than its current value, which caps your downside risk. So more broadly, the “Trump put” is the idea that Trump will back down if markets have too much of a tantrum.

I’ve expressed skepticism of this idea before because it anthropomorphizes “the market” into an entity that has agency and is capable of strategic behavior — when, in fact, the market is composed of individual firms and investors who are on a financial and emotional roller coaster.

TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) has become the slogan for the “Trump put” thesis that I described above. Trump does something that imperils the United States’ economic interests, whether tariffs or threatening to invade Greenland. The Dow sheds 1,000 points, and he reverses course. This doesn’t seem like a very stable equilibrium, however. If traders know that Trump is going to chicken out, they shouldn’t sell off in the first place; otherwise, you could always profit by “buying the dip”. But if markets don’t panic a little bit, how does Trump get the signal that he needs to TACO?

A game-theory equilibrium would almost certainly reveal that both sides are supposed to employ mixed strategies. In other words, sometimes they might be bluffing, but they can’t always be bluffing or there would be no deterrence. Some percentage of the time, they have to follow through with their threats: Trump to do the thing that markets don’t want, and the markets to actually get past the “freak out” stage into sustained, full-blown panic that might cause irreversible damage.

In a true mixed strategy, the participants in the “game” are supposed to be literally randomizing their actions.6 It might actually help Trump in a weird way that his behavior is effectively random in some ways based on the last person he talked to or the last TV segment he watched. Markets, though, would seem to be at a disadvantage because they’re composed of thousands of individual participants and there’s no way for them to coordinate:

Still, even other non-zero-sum “games” like nuclear deterrence rely on some degree of implicit randomization — what Thomas Schelling called “the threat that leaves something to chance”. (Basically, you don’t want to escalate when nuclear weapons are involved because mistakes can be made in the fog of war.)

If investors could get together and say: “every week you keep up with this tariff crap, Donnie, there’s a 5 percent chance we’ll have a panic that triggers a global financial crisis, with unrecoverable long-term damage to the economy,” then maybe that would work if Trump had read his Schelling, which he surely hasn’t. But that’s not how markets work. You can’t half-panic any more than you can be half-pregnant. And even markets could work this way, the strategy entails sometimes pulling the trigger, so you’re playing Russian Roulette.

But in that earlier story, I think I gave short shrift to the idea of Thomas Schelling’s idea of “the threat that leaves something to chance” as it applies to market behavior. Schelling, an economist who was one of the early developers of game theory, especially around nuclear deterrence, proposed the “threat that leaves something to chance” as a mechanism to explain why you don’t want to fuck around and find out when a country has nuclear weapons. It might be true that it would be irrational for them to retaliate with a nuclear strike for some lower-magnitude, more conventional escalatory move. But there can be misunderstandings in the fog of war. The world has only narrowly averted an inadvertent nuclear crisis before.

Back to markets. It might be the case that, even though individual market participants can’t coordinate on a strategy, their behavior is nevertheless effectively chaotic enough to serve as a deterrent. (In the literal sense of Chaos theory: i.e., small changes in initial conditions can produce highly variable and unpredictable results in a sufficiently complex system.) Thus, the market effectively does have a “mind of its own” and behaves randomly for all intents and purposes. There’s a lot that can be said for this theory. But if markets’ behavior is essentially random, it implies that markets sometimes will escalate an initial sell-off and it will cascade into something worse.

Oil prices have been fluctuating wildly, of course, from a steady state of about $65-$70 barrel before Iran7 to as high as almost $120, before settling into something in the $90-$100 range recently as of this writing. But some analysts think oil could reach as high as $200 a barrel if the crisis in the Persian Gulf persists for more than another few weeks. At $95 a barrel, or even $120, markets actually are still hedging their bets. These prices imply that Trump probably will chicken out: $120 is closer to the baseline of $70 than to $200-a-barrel oil. But there’s a credible threat that he does not. I’m not sure that’s so irrational, even if prices at any given moment can become unmoored based on market psychology.8

Trump and markets aren’t the only players with something at stake

Or, the matter might be out of his hands. Tariffs, a previous source of market anxiety, are unusual to some degree because, especially before the SCOTUS ruling, they’re something that more or less could be turned on or off with the literal stroke of the executive’s pen.

Sure, there might be some purely market-based mechanisms for moments of anxiety over tariffs to spiral into something more, like from bond markets panicking. But when you can’t just press the “UNDO” button — we’ve already killed Iran’s leader — there are far more ways for things to go wrong, especially in a multilateral “game”.

Iran has a say, for one thing. If it believes the best way to deter Trump is by triggering a decline the markets and/or a spike in his unpopularity ratings because oil and gas prices are surging, it has every incentive to keep oil prices surging. Or a country like China could try to take advantage of overstretched American military capabilities. And the United States didn’t go to war alone; we’re partnered with Israel, which reportedly threatened to proceed unilaterally with or without us.

Administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, briefed lawmakers on Monday about the “imminent threat” Iran posed and that Israel would strike first, prompting the U.S. to launch its own attack. Some lawmakers found this to be suspect.

I’m not going to predict how this will go. Maybe the Department of War has some sort of coherent plan (I suppose I’d have more confidence if Pete Hegseth weren’t leading it, but I know what I don’t know). The base case of “cooler heads will prevail” or “nothing really matters” is usually a reliable assumption in a $100 trillion global economy: markets have been incredibly resilient to COVID, the invasion of Ukraine, and other things. But usually isn’t always, and war in the Middle East is the very opposite of an easy-mode problem.

In early 2016, presidential candidate Donald Trump said, “Unlike other candidates for the presidency, war and aggression will not be my first instinct.” He mused that invading Iraq “may have been the worst decision” in presidential history and said that Hillary Clinton had bad judgment. “Look at the war in Iraq, if you look at what she did with Libya, which was a total catastrophe.”1 This dovish rhetoric put Trump at odds with members of the more hawkish Republican establishment like Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush.

Fast forward eight years, and Trump once again ran against “forever wars” and sending American soldiers to fight abroad in 2024. But those were no longer fringe positions in the GOP. A meaningful share of the Republican establishment was fully behind MAGA-style isolationism. JD Vance — somewhat of a standard-bearer on the anti-interventionist right — was Trump’s VP pick. On the media side of things, Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes spoke to different parts of the Republican base about the dangers of foreign entanglement, as did prominent members of Congress like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Of course, there’s still a more hawkish contingent of Republican elites. But that didn’t stop the Trump campaign from running with an anti-war message. Compared to something like immigration, the party is well and truly split on the value of international military action.

Trump, who is much less ideologically consistent than the true interventionist or anti-interventionist members of the GOP, has the final say in these disputes at the moment. He’s so far swung toward the Rubio side of the party during his second term, capturing Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and most recently starting a war with Iran.

So how has each wing of the Republican Party reacted to our latest international foray? Here’s Sen. Lindsey Graham for the hawks: “The end of the largest state sponsor of terrorism is upon us. God bless President Trump, our military and our allies in Israel.” He’s not alone. There are increasing signals that Republican donors prefer Rubio to Vance in 2028, which means that Nate might get to look smart for picking Rubio in our recent 2028 Republican primary “draft”.2

But Carlson called the Iran strikes “absolutely disgusting and evil.” Fuentes has gone even further, encouraging his followers to boycott the 2026 midterms or even vote Democrat in response to Iran and other issues. Joe Rogan has referred to the Iran War as “insane”.3 “I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right? He ran on no more wars and these stupid senseless wars, and then we have one that we can’t even really clearly define why we did it,” he recently said.

So far, MAGA voters remain highly loyal to Trump

So if there’s ever going to be an issue that causes a meaningful number of Republican voters to break with Trump, Iran seems like a top candidate. (Plus, the increase in gas prices has so far been slightly higher in red states like Florida.) It’s easy enough to imagine a world where the more isolationist members of Trump’s MAGA base oppose the foreign military action, while it’s supported by older, more traditional members of the GOP. That would be a reversal from the usual way things break for Trump — for example, on an issue like tariffs.

To level-set, the war in Iran is not popular with Americans in general. Support for the strikes and approval of Trump’s approach to Iran are underwater in nearly every poll conducted since the start of the war, and the Iran War is less popular than other foreign conflicts were at their outset.4 To put some numbers to that, we averaged every Iran poll conducted since February 27. The war is opposed by 50 percent of Americans and supported by 40 percent.5

It’s a different story for Republicans, 77 percent of whom support the war, on average. But that’s exactly what we’d expect for almost any Trump policy. Take the Venezuela strikes: Republicans were always more supportive of that operation than Democrats or independents. And Republican support only increased over time, especially after Maduro was captured. (That’s not inherently a dig at Republicans; Democrats also tend to overwhelmingly approve of the actions of Democratic presidents.)

The real question is whether you see more Republican defections on Iran than you do on other salient topics that don’t touch on the isolationism question. To answer that, let’s compare Republican approval of the Iran War to some crosstab averages of Trump’s approval on salient issues like immigration and inflation, plus his overall job approval rating.6

At first glance, there’s not much evidence of a larger-than-average split in the GOP. The share of Republicans who disapprove of the Iran War (13 percent) is on the low end compared to issues like tariffs (20 percent) and inflation (22 percent). However, the share of Republicans who approve of the Iran War is also lower than Trump’s approval rating on the economy and immigration. That’s partially because more voters answer “don’t know” or “no opinion” on questions about Iran — which is pretty reasonable for such a recent event.

To avoid that problem, we can look at Republicans’ net approval of these issues. It’s also worth comparing those numbers to Trump’s net approval rating among all Americans. If Iran is causing a larger-than-average break among Republican voters, the gap between Republican support for the war and support among all Americans should be smaller than expected.

On average, Trump’s Republican advantage across his job approval rating and the four issues we track is +78 — meaning his net approval among Republicans is 78 percentage points higher than his net approval rating among all Americans. In comparison, it’s just +74 points for the Iran conflict: -11 net support overall compared to +63 among Republicans.

So, the Iran War is about 4 points less popular among Republicans than you’d expect, given its overall popularity. Still, that’s not yet a big difference. So why, when so many high-profile MAGA isolationists are opposed to the war, is the backlash among Republican voters so muted?

In large part, it’s because the Republican voters you’d expect to be most opposed to the war (at least ideologically) are actually the most supportive. Some pollsters release crosstabs for Republicans who identify with the MAGA movement. How they identify those voters varies — YouGov, for example, asks “Are you a MAGA supporter?” — so comparing these groups across different polls isn’t exactly apples to apples.

But in this case, the results are highly consistent: Republicans who identify with the MAGA movement are much more supportive of the war than Republicans in general. For example, RMG Research found that a group they call “Trump-policy voters” favored the US attack on Iran by a margin of +75, compared to just +35 among “traditional GOP voters.” Similarly, net support for using military force to overthrow the government of Iran is +68 among MAGA Republicans compared to just +11 among non-MAGA, according to YouGov.

That’s the opposite of what you’d expect ideologically, but it partially comes down to ambiguity about how voters self-identify as MAGA. Does MAGA mean voters who are extra Trumpy in a literal sense of tending to support everything that Trump does? Or do voters see the term as a stand-in for populist, anti-establishment conservatism of the sort you might associate with Carlson or Greene?

In practice, it’s probably the former. Across the board, Republican voters who identify with the MAGA movement tend to be more supportive of everything Trump does.

But this also looks like a case where elite opinion could serve as a leading indicator of mass Republican opinion. The isolationist turn among a meaningful number of Republican policymakers is relatively recent, and that sort of change can take a while to filter down to the broader party.

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What can we learn from Democrats?

Democrats provide an imperfect analogy for various reasons. There’s no singular figure in the Democratic Party that has anywhere near the personality-cult-type gravity of Trump; in fact, when you poll them, Democrats have no idea who their party leaders are. And despite the Democratic base’s angry mood, the party’s college-dominated coalition still tends to have far more respect for elite and expert opinion. Potential 2028 candidates like Gavin Newsom have cleverly exploited the situation by promising to fight back harder against Trump, while also running as trustworthy “electable” brands and without really challenging any of the party’s ideological commitments. (And James Talarico was probably the more establishment-friendly candidate in the Texas Democratic Senate primary, although that’s a complicated case.7)

But still, take Gaza. For years, there was a contingent of progressive Democrats who were skeptical of Israel and AIPAC, and made support for Palestine an important part of their campaigns. But that was a minority position among both elected Democrats and Democratic voters. Over time, however, the entrance of younger voters and politicians into the party, combined with the war in Gaza, has made these positions much more mainstream. According to Gallup, 65 percent of Democrats now say their sympathies lie more with Palestinians than Israelis.

The equilibrium could change as Trump looks more like a lame duck

The same thing could easily happen with Iran for Republicans. In the short term, support among all voters will probably depend on whether the war results in additional US casualties or fuel prices continue to rise.

But keep in mind that Trump is increasingly a lame duck. When he leaves office, it’s reasonably likely that the next generation of Republican leaders will be more ideologically committed to MAGA-style isolationism.

In 2008, with Bush deeply into lame-duck territory, eventual nominee John McCain repudiated Bush’s handling of Iraq but stopped short of conceding that the original idea to go to war had been a bad one. But as 2028 approaches, there could be a sharper break. Republican-affiliated elites like Carlson8 may skate where they see the puck as going, figuring that the cost of crossing Trump diminishes over time while positioning for 2028 becomes more important. Combined with younger voters’ antipathy to foreign entanglements, the base’s appetite for isolationism could look closer to Carlson’s view9 than to the old guard of Bush-era Republicans. And perhaps, even, there will be a cohort of MAGA-identified voters who think that Trump isn’t MAGA enough.

As the headline suggests, it’s gas prices. Although the United States is less reliant on foreign oil than it once was, the war in Iran could be a perfect storm for gas and energy prices in the U.S. and elsewhere to spike.

Iranian production of oil is severely disrupted, of course, with the U.S. and Israel attacking the country’s fuel infrastructure. But Iran itself isn’t that large a supplier of oil. Estimates vary from source to source, but it was something like the 6th to 8th largest producer in 2024, extracting 4 to 5 percent of the world’s oil.

However, there are two other problems downstream from cutting off Iranian production. One is that Iran has retaliated by attacking oil production facilities in other Gulf States. The other is that the Strait of Hormuz is essentially shut down to shipping traffic. Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain, combined with Iran, collectively provide about 30 percent of the world’s oil.

According to the AAA, average retail gas prices in the U.S. are now $3.45 per gallon, up about 50 cents from a week ago. However, the problems are likely to worsen significantly as supply chains are disrupted. Traders at Polymarket anticipate that the most likely range for gas prices to land by the end of March is between $4.50 and $5.00. And although there’s a wide range of uncertainty, there’s a 41 percent chance they exceed $5.00 by the end of the month. The all-time record, according to the EIA, was $5.01 in June, 2022.

Americans are used to gas price fluctuations, but it’s not all that common for prices to go quite this vertical in the span of a month:

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So far, as Eli wrote at our Trump tracking page, there hasn’t been much of a shift in the president’s approval ratings. The war is broadly unpopular in polls, but Trump was unpopular to begin with. Unlike something like Venezuela, however, this isn’t some sort of surgical strike. It’s not at all clear what the U.S. and Israel even want to achieve.

Trump’s nonchalance about all of this won’t help him either. He literally campaigned on lower gas prices in 2024, and inflation was a substantial factor in his defeat of Biden. The sharp rise in gas prices in late spring and early summer 2022 was associated with a noticeable decline in Biden’s approval ratings from the 40s into the high 30s. It all would seem to follow a classic script of how second terms can turn into lame duck presidencies.

And that’s probably a good thing because — man, it was much harder to come up with good picks for this one. Not that Democrats don’t have their problems, but they at least have some good prospects in the form of consistently electorally overperforming governors and senators.3 But with Trump having dominated the Republican Party for 12 years now, both squashing potential rivals and tainting potential successors as he grows increasingly unpopular, the GOP side is more like the infamous 2000 NBA Draft.

So here were my picks (⭐), as well as my reviews of Galen’s and Clare’s choices. The scoring system is the same as for the Democrats: the goal is basically to identify the eventual nominee, but you can pick up incremental points if your candidates officially run and reach various other milestones.

1. JD Vance (Galen). To stretch the fantasy football analogy, perhaps this would have worked better as an auction rather than a draft, since Vance is trading far higher than anyone else at prediction markets. Though now he’s slipped to 42 percent from a peak of 59 percent in November, which seems like a more reasonable price. Vance isn’t popular with the broader electorate, though he’s less unpopular than Trump. But not unlike Kamala Harris, he’s going to be tagged with whatever dissatisfactions voters have with his boss while struggling to forge his own identity. And I don’t know that Trumpism without Trump works — it certainly hasn’t produced good outcomes for the GOP in midterms and other elections when Trump himself isn’t on the ballot. Also, like Harris, Vance has an underwhelming electoral track record. Before the vice presidency, Vance had only run for office once, winning his Ohio Senate seat by 6 points in 2022, a notably lower margin than Trump’s 11-point margin there in 2024. He’s a smart guy, and he was good in the VP debate, though it helped that Tim Walz was as visibly nervous as a 16-year-old asking a girl to prom. But … if not Vance, who else is it going to be? He’s way ahead in polls, and the early polling frontrunner wins more often than you might think.4 And he already has some institutional support, having been endorsed by Erika Kirk.

2. ⭐ Marco Rubio (Nate). I was skittish to make this pick, having been burned in my fruitless search for Rubiomentum in 2016, when I was far too late to acknowledge Trump’s staying power. (Hey, he did win Minnesota.5) But I think Little Marco is the fairly obvious number two. It’s not at all uncommon for presidential nominees to do better on their second or third try: see Mitt Romney or Joe Biden, for instance. Rubio has a longer and more impressive résumé than Vance, and his electoral performance in Florida was pretty good, even considering the state’s increasingly red tilt. One can also imagine Trump going into reality TV show mode, auditioning various candidates for his endorsement and eventually preferring Rubio to Vance. The obvious liability is that Rubio is going to be associated with Trump’s increasingly unpopular foreign policy, with Iran already causing major divides in the GOP — and wars usually only get more unpopular the longer they go.

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James Talarico, a 36-year-old state representative, won the contentious Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in Texas last night. With 93 percent of the vote counted, Talarico leads U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett by 7 points. There is a fair bit of vote left to be tallied in Dallas, a Crockett stronghold, which might shrink that margin a bit, but it should be a comfortable-enough win. Turnout is already more than 2.2 million votes, eclipsing GOP turnout by 100,000+ votes and more than doubling the 967,503 Democrats who turned out in the 2024 Senate primary. I’m not a big believer in primary turnout being predictive of general election outcomes, but this is nevertheless a big number for Democrats in a red state.

Meanwhile, on the Republican side, we’re headed to a runoff. Incumbent U.S. Senator John Cornyn leads Ken Paxton 42-41 with 94 percent of the vote in, but that’s well short of the 50 percent needed to advance automatically. The runoff is scheduled for May 26, so we’re going to be hearing a lot more about this race.

In today’s newsletter, I’m going to take an almost SBSQ-like approach by splitting it into three parts:

1. Following up on last week’s story, what should we make of the difference between prediction markets and polls in Texas?

2. Was this a win for moderates versus progressives?

3. And then the main course: an early look ahead to November and how we should think about Talarico’s chances.

We’ll run the first two parts for everyone and leave the third as a bonus for paying subscribers.

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Prediction markets got a big “W” on Talarico but took an “L” on Cornyn

Although most of the attention was on the Dem side, one could argue that the GOP result was the more surprising and significant one. In the final seven pre-election polls, Paxton led by an average of 4 points. Given how (in)accurate primary polls tend to be, a 1-point loss isn’t that far from the mark — and making the runoff is what matters most. As Eli covered last week, the case reflected in hypothetical runoff polling is that Paxton will pick up the bulk of votes from the third candidate, U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt, another conservative/MAGA type, probably enough to put him over the top.

However, the conventional wisdom has been rattled because this is one of those cases where, along with the prediction markets, it got ahead of itself in the first round. At Polymarket, Cornyn had fallen to as low as 5 percent to win the first round as of 10 a.m. Tuesday morning; those chances are now 98 percent.

And the runoff is now nearly trading as a toss-up — another big boost for Cornyn from 17 percent as of yesterday morning.

The perception of a disappointing night for Paxton is also reflected in media coverage of the race: Politico described the Republican result as an “unexpectedly strong showing” for Cornyn. But it may be that those expectations were miscalibrated. Texas is only projecting to be a 5-point polling error (Cornyn +1 rather than Paxton +4), which is well below average for a primary. One of my longstanding complaints is that even relatively well-informed political observers don’t do enough to distinguish the robustness of a polling lead: how an 8-point lead is much less likely to result in an upset than a 4-point lead, for example, or how a 4-point lead is much more solid in the general than in the primaries.

Still, the perception of overperformance has contributed to speculation that President Trump will endorse Cornyn — or at least not endorse Paxton — and that would be a big deal.

On the Democratic side, though, this was a big “W” for prediction markets. As I covered last week, prediction markets were always more confident in Talarico than the polling alone could justify.1 And then Talarico’s stock soared further on Tuesday afternoon when turnout numbers were stronger where Talarico needed them. Last night, prediction markets were much quicker to essentially “call” the race once votes started to be counted than the news networks were.

My conclusion to last week’s story was that Talarico probably did deserve to be considered the favorite despite the mixed polling, but not to the extent that prediction markets had him. Half-right, half-wrong, I guess?2 I’m not quite sure how to feel this one, especially given that these same markets were overconfident on the GOP side.

Crockett might not be more liberal, but she was more partisan

At the New York Times yesterday, Nate Cohn had a good story about how while Talarico might have been perceived as more moderate, that isn’t necessarily justified if you look at their voting records and stated issue positions. In Congress, Crockett’s voting record has been closer to the middle/mainstream of the Democratic Party than the left wing. Meanwhile, Talarico, despite emphasizing his background as a Presbyterian seminarian, mostly has conventionally left-progressive positions.

Undoubtedly, race and gender also play some role in how these candidates are perceived. I don’t think Crockett was entirely wrong to question the notion of “electability” as applied on this basis.

However, I think both these perspectives leave something out — because there’s more going on here than how Talarico and Crockett might fill out some sort of ideological questionaire.

Another longstanding Silver Bulletin pet peeve is how observers frequently confuse partisanship for ideology. Partisanship means loyalty and adherence to a political party or organized faction — such as the Democratic Party. For example, I’d argue that Democrats who defended Joe Biden even after his disastrous debate last June were being extremely partisan, but this had little to do with whether you were left or center.3 Indeed, the faction of the Democratic Party that I’ve called the #Resistance is often highly partisan — sometimes more so than the populist left.

And Crockett frequently played into that partisanship. Not only did she defend Biden after the debate; she went on TV to defend the pardon of Hunter Biden. (Ironically, Crockett nevertheless received the endorsement of Kamala Harris last week in the latest sign of Harris’s terrible political instincts.)

And while Crockett has emphasized the importance of Democratic turnout rather than persuasion, there’s more going on than just that. Crockett is also known for schoolyard insults, such as in calling Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, “Governor Hot Wheels.” She’s flirted with election denialism at times, like by calling Trump “the person who allegedly got elected”. And Crockett went full-on Blue MAGA in kicking an Atlantic reporter out of a rally last week.

Their January debate also provided some clues to their respective attempts at persuasion. Talarico and Crockett weren’t necessarily coming to majorly different conclusions on substance. But these are emotionally different approaches, with Crockett tending to run “hot” while Talarico ran as righteously angry but more detached and even-keeled:

“I am not just sitting in D.C.,” she said. “I am getting out into the streets. And right now, to be perfectly honest, if we’re going to win and keep our country, we’re going to need somebody who can file bills but also knows how to be a street fighter.”

Talarico, meanwhile, highlighted his experience as a middle school teacher and his record fighting “tooth and nail” in the Texas House, where he frequently went viral over clips of his exchanges with Republicans on proposals including private school vouchers and a mandate to display the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.

“The best indicator of future behavior is past behavior,” he said. “I have gone toe to toe with the billionaires who are trying to dismantle public education in this state.”

While Crockett’s partisan brand of messaging obviously has its appeal in a primary — her 46 percent of the vote is hardly embarrassing — this may help to explain why voters saw Talarico as more moderate. Especially in a state like Texas that hasn’t elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988, partisanship is a tough sell from an “electability” standpoint. Incidentally, voters might not be wrong about this. In the Silver Bulletin election models, the measure we used to evaluate “ideology” is actually a partisan loyalty score based on voting records in Congress. We’ve found that candidates who buck their party more often — who are less partisan — perform a few points better, other things being equal.

Meanwhile, one can detect an element of Zohran Mamdani in Talarico’s approach, in emphasizing economic populism rather than cultural hot buttons and in being more of a happy warrior. Still, as talented as I think Mamdani is, that sort of message is easier to sell in New York City than in New Braunfels. And GOP ad-makers will search through every clip of Talarico’s heated primary with Crockett to identify instances where he seemed out of touch with a still-very-red state.

A look ahead to November

It’s easy to make fun of Beto O’Rourke, the former U.S. Rep. who flopped in a 2020 campaign for president and then lost to Abbott by 11 points in the 2022 gubernatorial race. But O’Rourke also had the best showing for Democrats in years in the 2018 U.S. Senate race by losing to Ted Cruz by less than three points. So let’s take a quick look at how 2018 differed from other recent elections where Democrats haven’t even come close.

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This weekend, as I’m sure you’re aware, the United States launched a series of airstrikes on Iran, including one that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran has retaliated by attacking the UAE and other Gulf States that have comparatively friendly relationships with the U.S.

So the United States is at war with Iran. I try to be precise with our language at Silver Bulletin, but you’d think it would be safe to say this, right?

Well, at Wikipedia, the entry for “2026 Iran–United States war” redirects to “2026 Israeli–United States strikes on Iran”. As much as I value it as a resource, Wikipedia’s politics can be complicated these days. So let’s turn to the mainstream media. The New York Times banner headline when I started drafting this story1 was literally “War With Iran Widens”:

Just a few minutes after I started writing, however, the Times’s headline changed to “Mideast Conflict Widens Across Multiple Fronts”:

Personally, I’m going to stick with “war”, especially with the conflict escalating and Trump saying that the strikes will continue for at least several weeks.

This pedantic aside isn’t really intended as media criticism, however, nor as any sort of comment on foreign policy. Instead, my scope is narrower. Public opinion is one of Silver Bulletin’s main beats, and I’m sure readers have questions about the downstream effects of Iran on American domestic politics (even if it’s not the most important part of the story).

However, the fact that there’s a debate about how to even describe what’s happening in Iran illustrates how war is changing, and there can be dangers in making sloppy extrapolations from the past.

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The traditional model: Rally-around-the-flag, then quagmire and backlash

I first officially got into the business of covering politics in 2008, a time when the Iraq War was massively unpopular and was instrumental to Barack Obama’s victories in both the primary (Hillary Clinton had voted for the war) and the general election.2 At that point, the relevant data set for the effect of wars on American politics was comprised of 4 or 5 (depending on how you count) post-WW2 conflicts: Korea, Vietnam, the 1990-91 Gulf War (a.k.a. Operation Desert Storm) and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, sometimes lumped together under the “War on Terror”. The conventional wisdom was something like this:

1. The war will initially be popular, producing patriotic feelings and boosting the president’s popularity: the so-called rally-around-the-flag effect.

2. However, unless it is resolved quickly (as was only the case in the Gulf War from among these examples), it will eventually become a quagmire, and the president’s popularity will suffer after extended deployments and deaths of American troops.

Of course, this conceals several differences between these conflicts. As wars are increasingly fought with airpower rather than on the ground — and now with drones, and even AI — there’s no longer the necessity for a draft, as there was for Vietnam and Korea. All of these wars have been destructive: counting civilians and foreign soldiers, there were at least several hundred thousand deaths from the War on Terror, and possibly something closer to 900,000. But less of the destruction has been visited upon American troops.

U.S. military deaths were an order of magnitude lower in Afghanistan and Iraq than in Vietnam and Korea.3 They’ve been an order of magnitude lower still in what the military officially calls Operation Inherent Resolve, basically our war against ISIS in Iraq, Syria and Libya. No American soldiers were killed in the January raid of Venezuela, which resulted in the capture of President Nicolas Maduro. In the Iran conflict, 4 U.S. troops have been killed so far as of this writing.

The new conventional wisdom: nothing matters?

So the emerging conventional wisdom (see January’s newsletter on Venezuela for more on this) is that American voters are increasingly indifferent about wars — until and unless there are attacks on American soil, large numbers of casualties among American troops, or a draft.

None of those things were remotely likely as a result of Venezuela. But while I’m not going to speculate about what could spin up from Iran, there are obviously more risks. It’s a much bigger country in the most politically volatile part of the world. This time, the U.S./Israeli operations are far more than a “surgical strike”, like the strikes on Iranian nuclear sites last June. Trump wants regime change, and Khamenei is dead.

Still, you might think the increasing efficiency of war these days might encourage American presidents to engage in more of it. In the 1997 satire Wag the Dog, emblematic of the conventional wisdom at the time, the president hired a Hollywood producer to stage a war with Albania to distract the media and the public after he was caught flirting with a girl scout. All of this was literally fake news — there was no actual war, just footage produced on Hollywood sound stages. But if there’s less practical and political fallout from war these days, why not try the real thing to get the same effect?

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However, it’s also not clear there’s any political upside from doing this. The rally-around-the-flag effect has largely disappeared. In our approval rating tracking, there’s been no obvious benefit or harm to Trump from the previous major foreign policy events of his second term, including Venezuela or the previous strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Even if these efforts were apparently successful, the public is perhaps appropriately cynical after one too many premature declarations of “mission accomplished”.

3 reasons why Iran might be different

We deliberately don’t do a lot of posts on “issue polling” at Silver Bulletin. While high-level attitudes are worth looking at, there’s something of a cottage industry at other Substacks of cherry-picking issue polling that suits the author and/or his audience’s priors. Almost all of this polling tends to presume more knowledge from voters than they actually have4, the question wording can be leading, and it otherwise often misses the forest for the trees. For what it’s worth, the polling so far on the Iran strikes is mediocre at best for Trump. But the polling on Venezuela also started out poorly for Trump before improving, and it’s not clear that it ultimately had much political impact in any direction.

There are, however, three factors, above and beyond the possibility of escalation, that make the situation with Iran higher stakes, with risks that are mostly to the downside for Trump.

1. Iran is a much bigger oil producer than Venezuela, by a factor of approximately 5x, and conflict in the Middle East could also disrupt shipping routes or oil production in other countries. Crude oil prices spiked when markets opened today, and while the U.S. is now more self-sufficient (indeed we’re now the world’s largest oil producer), the impact could be passed along in the form of higher gas prices to the American consumer.

2. The war is being conducted jointly with Israel. I’m trying to say this without getting myself into trouble. But you might have noticed that Israel is a complicated issue in American politics, sometimes creating horseshoe-type coalitions while creating a lot of intraparty tension for both Democrats and Republicans.

3. Finally, because the conflict is in the Middle East, and because it’s liable to persist for at least a few weeks, it’s more likely to remind voters of Iraq and Afghanistan. Most voters probably will indeed see this as a war, not a “strike” or “intervention” the order of Libya in 2011 or an “incursion” or “raid” like on Venezuela in January. And that represents backtracking from some of the themes Trump emphasized in both of his winning campaigns; part of his success in 2016 came from repudiating George W. Bush’s position on Iraq. While it’s undoubtedly true that a large share of Trump’s base will remain loyal to him, one can imagine a type of swing voter who is bothered by what seem like broken promises.

In his first term, there were a lot of critiques one might make of Trump. But normies could at least claim that, as much as the libs were freaking out, he kept a good economy running until COVID hit, and kept the United States out of trouble abroad. Perceptions of the economy are much worse than during Trump’s first term, however, and while markets rebounded today after opening lower, the public tends to react negatively to any sort of additional uncertainty or volatility. And even if an Iraq-style quagmire is less likely and Trump is probably canny enough not to commit a large number of ground troops, it’s not clear who was asking for this exactly. The base case is that Iran will fade into the background, as Venezuela did. But there’s a distinct whiff of lame duck in this sort of foreign adventurism.

Before we begin, one more pitch for our Comedy Cellar (NYC) event at 6 p.m. next Wednesday, March 4, with Galen Druke and Clare Malone (+ guest appearance by Eli!). We’ll draft Republican presidential primary candidates, as we did for Democrats last time. But this will also be the night after the Texas primaries, the subject of today's newsletter, so I’m sure we’ll have a lot to say about those. There are still some tickets left, and we hope to see you there! UPDATE: The show is now sold out.

⏱️ UPDATE (Feb. 26, 6:45 PM): A new poll was released a couple of hours after we published this story, which showed Talarico leading. We definitely don’t want to get into the habit of updating any polling-related story every time a new poll is published or we’d never get anything done, and we also don’t want to do any stealth edits. So the text of the story is unchanged from this afternoon1, but I added a few comments at the very end.

Nate Silver: Let’s try something a little different today. Eli’s going to be the play-by-play guy. But as someone with strong feelings about the whole polls-versus-prediction markets thing, I’ll jump in with some color commentary. Eli, take it away! And yes, this is going to get wonky, so let’s bring that Model Talk banner out of storage.

Eli McKown-Dawson: Earlier this week, we wrote about whether Texas Republicans are about to repeat the classic GOP mistake of nominating a subpar, scandal-plagued Senate candidate (spoiler alert: probably yes). But Tuesday’s big-ticket event is the Texas Democratic Senate primary. U.S. House Member Jasmine Crockett of “bleach blonde bad built butch body2” fame is running against Texas House Member James Talarico. Former U.S. Rep. Colin Allred — who ran for the Senate against Ted Cruz in 2024 — was in the race, but he dropped out when Crockett jumped in.

With only two major candidates running, we’re unlikely to see a runoff in May (unlike on the other side of the aisle), so next week’s contest is especially meaningful.

Nate: Did you say “unlikely,” Eli? That’s the bat-signal for Nitpicky Nate. 🦇 There is an obscure third candidate, Ahmad Hassan, in the race. In past U.S. Senate primaries, Hassan has gotten between 1.5 and 3.5 of the vote. Presumably, he’ll get less this time with two such high-profile frontrunners. But I’d ballpark perhaps a 15 percent chance of a runoff. Because this could easily come down to just a point or two.

Eli: How competitive is this race? The number of early votes cast in the Democratic primary is already 139 percent of the final early vote total in the 2022 primary.

It’s also been a contentious contest, above and beyond the usual attack ads. Here’s an example: earlier this month, an influencer alleged that Talarico said he had “signed up to run against a mediocre Black man, not a formidable, intelligent Black woman,” with the Black man in question being Allred. Talarico said his remark was mischaracterized, but not before Allred released a heated response video and endorsed Crockett. Crockett also disputed that Talarico’s comment was mischaracterized: “Oh, you said it. Right? Because, now, it’s ‘Oh, she misinterpreted.’ Because of course the Black woman would misinterpret, right?”

Nate: I hate this kind of stuff, but my opinion has approximately zero correlation with the typical Democratic primary voter. Just to benchmark, the Democratic electorate in the 2020 presidential primary in Texas was 44 percent white, 32 percent Hispanic, 20 percent Black, 58 percent without college degrees (lower than typical for a Democratic primary), and only 25 percent age 65+ (unusually young for a primary). It’s not a “very online” cohort of voters. But young-ish, predominantly non-college Black and Hispanic voters are also a hard group to reach in polls. (You know who really likes answering polls? Old white people.)

So maybe Crockett ought to get a little credit for knowing her audience. Although overall, this tends to default me toward “nobody knows anything”. I don’t think most of the people making confident claims about this race have a good mental model of the Texas Democratic primary electorate, and I don’t either, which is why it’s probably best to start with the more objective indicators.

Eli: This is Silver Bulletin, so our first stop, as usual, is the polls. We have ten polls of the race comparing Crockett and Talarico, and the individual results range from Crockett +18 to Talarico +9.3 But only three of those were conducted in February: one showed Crockett leading by 12 points and the other two (both affiliated with Talarico’s campaign) had Talarico up by 4 points and 6 points.

Nate: Not the best set of polling. Almost everything is either candidate-sponsored or out of date, or both. The rule of thumb is that candidates exaggerate their standing by 3-5 points in internal polls they share with the public. So if Talarico’s leaking numbers showing himself up 4-6 points, that implies more of a toss-up than a Talarico lead.

Thus, I’d characterize “the polls” as showing a Crockett lead. If we put this into our polling average algorithm, it would adjust and discount those internals, and note that Crockett actually had bigger leads in the last two nonpartisan polls (12 points and 8 points) than Talarico showed in his internals anyway. I’m also not particularly impressed that Talarico is releasing multiple internals instead of just one. If anything, it comes across as a little insecure.4

Eli: So, you’d rather be Crockett, right?

Wrong, at least according to prediction markets, which have had Talarico as the strong favorite since December. His win probability on Polymarket dipped to just 66 percent after the most recent nonpartisan poll showing Crockett leading was released, but it’s back up to 72 percent today. That’s a departure from the GOP Senate race, where the markets are tracking the polls pretty closely.

Clearly, there’s something else pulling bettors not just toward the middle, but strongly in favor of Talarico. What is it?

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Voters will go to the polls in Texas next week — many have already voted early — and most of the attention has been on the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, where Jasmine Crockett and James Talarico are locked in a tight and increasingly nasty battle. But that Democratic primary isn’t necessarily just a fight for the silver medal in November. Texas is a potentially winnable race for Democrats, in part because Republicans have plenty of problems of their own. In fact, the smart money is that incumbent Sen. John Cornyn will lose his job. So let’s cover the Republican primary today, and we’ll have a story about the Democrats in your inbox later this week.

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After every election, political commentators come up with countless theories for why the losing party failed. There’s usually a fair amount of disagreement about the correct lesson. But for 2022, a year when Republicans actually lost a seat in the Senate despite facing an already unpopular Joe Biden, it’s relatively uncontroversial to say that Republicans shot themselves in the foot by nominating a bunch of less-than-stellar candidates. It wasn’t the party’s only problem — the backlash triggered by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade also hurt the GOP — but still, they lost winnable Senate races in Georgia and Pennsylvania in part because they nominated flawed candidates like Herschel Walker and Dr. Mehmet Oz.1

The Republican primary in Texas is giving strong 2022 vibes. Cornyn — an establishment figure who has a close relationship with Mitch McConnell and broke with Senate Republicans by not joining lawsuits challenging the certification of 2020 election results — is running against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton is something of a MAGA darling and was recently endorsed by Turning Point USA, although President Trump hasn’t endorsed any one candidate in the race (more on that in a bit).

Paxton is also a scandal-magnet. And by scandals, I don’t mean missing a few votes in the Texas Senate:

• Paxton has allegedly cheated on his soon-to-be ex-wife (herself a member of the Texas state Senate) with two different women.

• To cover up the first affair, he allegedly abused his office to help a friend and real estate developer. In exchange, the developer hired Paxton’s girlfriend and helped the two meet in secret using a shared Uber account.

• The Texas House impeached Paxton over these corruption allegations, although he was acquitted by the Senate in 2023.2

• Paxton was also charged with securities fraud in 2015. The charges were dropped in 2024 after he agreed to pay $300,000 in restitution and complete some community service.

Cornyn will (probably) make it to the runoff

Although Cornyn is a favorite to lose eventually, don’t expect him to be officially knocked out next week. The race has gotten more complicated since U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt threw his hat in the ring in October. Hunt is also coming at Cornyn from the right, but his biggest scandal actually is about missed votes. More importantly, a three-way race makes it unlikely that any candidate will receive more than 50 percent of the vote next week. That means the top two candidates will advance to a runoff on May 26.

In an average of recent polls, Paxton leads with 32 percent of the vote compared to 28 percent for Cornyn and 21 percent for Hunt. (This is pretty much a straight average, but I did weight more recent polls more heavily.3) Only one poll this year has shown Cornyn leading the race — and it was sponsored by a pro-Cornyn Super PAC.

The caveat here is that primary polls are historically error-prone, and Paxton’s lead is small enough that a normal-sized polling error could give Cornyn the top spot. More importantly, around 15-20 percent of respondents are undecided across recent Texas Republican primary polls. If those voters break toward Cornyn, he could win — though prediction markets have Paxton as the clear favorite.

Of course, coming first in the first round of a runoff is a purely symbolic victory. The more important question is whether Cornyn could miss the runoff altogether. He’s struggled since the race began despite vocal support from Republican leadership and the national party. Of the seven Republican primary polls released this year, Cornyn came third in two of them, and there’s been meaningful spending on attack ads against Hunt. Still, given Cornyn’s 7-point lead over Hunt in the polls, on average, he has good odds of at least eking out a 2nd-place finish.

But at this point, you might be thinking that a long-time incumbent struggling to break 30 percent in the polls in a three-way primary against two opponents running in a similar lane is an ominous signal for the eventual runoff, when he’d only face one of them. You’d be right.

Paxton is in pole position

The most likely runoff matchup is Paxton vs. Cornyn. Obviously, the worst-case scenario for Cornyn is being eliminated in the first round, but facing Paxton head-to-head isn’t much better. (Nor is Cornyn vs. Hunt, but that’s a less likely outcome.)

Why? Because both Paxton and Hunt are running as MAGA true believers, more in touch with the Texas Republican base and against the old-school establishment-coded Cornyn. When Paxton isn’t making headlines because of a scandal, he’s making them by spending more than $6 million suing the Biden administration and instructing Texas schools to display the Ten Commandments. Not to be outdone, Hunt’s campaign website homepage features no less than three photos of Donald Trump.

The upshot is that both Paxton and Hunt are competing for the same voters who are dissatisfied with Cornyn. If Hunt, for example, is eliminated in the first round, his voters will probably break toward Paxton, further cementing the attorney general’s lead. Cornyn has tried to prevent this eventuality by embracing Trump’s second-term agenda. The first thing you see on his campaign website is “Sen. John Cornyn Votes with President Trump 99% of the Time.” But it’s likely too little too late.

Most pollsters have tested hypothetical runoff matchups after asking about the three-way primary. Based on an average of those two-way polls conducted since Hunt entered the race, Paxton currently leads Cornyn by about eight points. True, 16 percent of voters are still undecided, but Cornyn would need to win about 75 percent of them just to break even with Paxton.

Going up against Hunt wouldn’t be any better: Cornyn gets essentially the same vote share in both comparisons. What about the establishment’s nightmare scenario where Cornyn goes out in the first round? It’s a closer race, but Paxton still leads Hunt by about three points. So the clear frontrunner, based on the polls, is Paxton. He’s highly likely to make the runoff, and is favored against either of his potential opponents.

That doesn’t mean the runoff outcome is a foregone conclusion. Particularly if the Democratic nominee is Talarico, who is likely to have more crossover appeal than Crockett, what’s left of the old-guard GOP establishment will pour money into the runoff in a last-ditch effort to avert giving Democrats a juicy opportunity against Paxton or Hunt. This Senate primary (including the Democratic side) is already the most expensive on record.

So far, however, establishment Republicans’ investment doesn’t look like it’s paying off. Indeed, Cornyn has massively outraised and outspent his opponents. Even looking at just their campaign accounts, Cornyn ended 2025 with about $6 million in cash on hand, compared to $3 million for Paxton and only $800k for Hunt. And that comparison undersells Cornyn’s monetary advantage. He’s backed by Senate GOP leadership and the NRSC, and his allies have spent nearly $50 million on advertising since July. But Cornyn hasn’t been able to convert his funding advantage into meaningful additional support.

So if not money, what could save Cornyn’s campaign? Well, there’s one force in the Republican party more powerful than $50 million dollars: it starts with a “T,” ends with a “P,” and has a penchant for long red ties. Yes, an endorsement from Trump might have been the only shot Cornyn had at frontrunner status.

For months, Trump said he would stay out of the race. But after Democrats flipped a Texas state Senate seat Trump won by 17 points in 2024, he said he was “taking a serious look” at making an endorsement. It’s unclear who Trump wants to see as the next Texas senator, but you’d imagine there’s a rigorous debate going on between the angel and the devil on his shoulders. Senate leadership is practically begging for Cornyn, but Trump’s instincts might be to go with a diehard supporter like Paxton. In the end, he cut the baby in half (into thirds?) with a blanket endorsement: “They’ve all supported me. They’re all good, and you’re supposed to pick one, so we’ll see what happens. But I support all three.”

How beatable would Paxton be?

The logic of investing so heavily in Cornyn is predicated on his being a meaningfully stronger general election candidate than Paxton. Is that true?

To level-set, anyone who wins the Republican Senate nomination will be a favorite in November. Based on the current D +5.4 generic ballot average, our state-level benchmark for Texas is R +5.4. Even if Democrats gain another five points between now and November, the environment in Texas would still only be neutral.

That said, Democrats can marginally improve their odds by nominating a candidate with the best chance at overperforming — we’ll have more on that for you soon.4 And Republicans might make the blue team’s job easier by nominating a weaker one.

Cornyn, for what it’s worth, isn’t an electoral superstar. According to Split Ticket, his wins above replacement (WAR) in 2020 was D +0.7 (meaning he underperformed expectations by about half a point). Hunt grades out similarly on this metric (he underperformed slightly in 2024 but overperformed in 2022 and 2020).

Split Ticket doesn’t publish WAR for attorney general candidates. Luckily, we can bring out our new SB Scores to compare each candidate against how the Republican presidential candidate performed in their state or district.5 Paxton slightly overperformed in his first two races for attorney general, but in 2022 he underperformed expectations by 2.8 points. In comparison, Cornyn overperformed our presidential baseline by an average of 7 points across his two most recent races. In their one overlapping race (2014), Cornyn ran 9 points ahead of our baseline compared to Paxton’s 2.7. Hunt has also been a consistent overperformer based on his SB Scores.

There are other reasons why you’d prefer Cornyn to Paxton in a general election. Most obviously, Cornyn is an incumbent — and there’s probably still somewhat of an incumbency advantage in these races even if it’s getting smaller. And he’s going to be more appealing to Texas independents than a conservative firebrand like Paxton.

Paxton’s scandals will also take up oxygen during the campaign. (They already feature heavily in Cornyn’s attack ads.) The last time I wrote about political scandals, my general conclusion was that they matter a lot less than they used to. But they can still weaken a candidate, which could be meaningful if 2026 ends up being a sufficiently large blue wave.6

Of course, the big difference between this case and 2022 is that Texas is much further away from being a swing state than Pennsylvania or Georgia. Republicans can afford to lose a few points on the margin without blowing the race. But it’s clear that the GOP hasn’t ended its love affair with “unique” candidates — to put things politely.

Before a short-ish newsletter today, a quick announcement. I’ll have another live show with my former FiveThirtyEight colleagues Galen Druke and Clare Malone at Comedy Cellar at 6 p.m. on Wed, March 4. You can buy tickets here. Last time, we conducted a Democratic 2028 candidate draft — so this time, we’ll tackle the Republicans. Plus, cover whatever crazy stories are circulating in the news. Honestly, the past few shows have been some of my favorite nights of the year, and the audience always seems to have fun. Come join us!

The New York Times interviewed me today about my vantage point at this early stage of the 2028 nomination race. Some of it is stuff you’ve probably heard before if you’re a Silver Bulletin regular, like how I think Gavin Newsom is the closest thing to a frontrunner.

However, this is not an endorsement of Newsom. We don’t make endorsements, and in fact, my prediction of what Democrats will do isn’t that correlated with what I think they should do if they want to maximize their chances of reclaiming the White House.

Don’t get me wrong, I think any basically reasonable Democrat could win, as I discussed in the Times story:

First, incumbents have been in a very bad way in the United States and around the world for several cycles now. It might almost be an advantage to be the party out of power.

And second, I expect Republicans to have a lot of trouble agreeing on a candidate who is not Donald Trump. They’ve done quite badly in the Trump era in nonpresidential elections.

Still, based on his electoral track record, I also don’t think Newsom would be a particularly good nominee as compared to someone like Ruben Gallego, Raphael Warnock, Andy Beshear, Gretchen Whitmer, or Josh Shapiro — and honestly, a lot of others, too. In this post, I just want to provide some data to back up that assertion.

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Newsom, like Harris, consistently underperforms other Democrats

Isn’t Gavin Newsom a winner? He certainly looks like one — and I’ll grant that his decision to put a partisan redistricting initiative on the ballot last year was a big success. Polls tend to show that Democratic voters see Newsom as “electable”. Indeed, Newsom has never lost an election, having advanced up the Golden State ladder from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to Governor of California.

But you know who else had never lost an election prior to 2024? Kamala Harris.

Yep, that’s right. Granted, Harris probably would have lost most if not all of the Democratic primaries and caucuses she entered had she remained on the ballot in her 2020 nomination campaign. But technically speaking, it’s true: Harris twice won elections for San Francisco District Attorney, twice for Attorney General, once for U.S. Senate, and once for vice president — until she lost every swing state to Trump.

Of course, it’s not hard to win as a Democrat in California. And if you’d looked at Harris’s margins relative to other Democrats, you’d have had good reason for skepticism. In 2010, for instance, she very nearly lost the AG race in California, prevailing by just 0.8 points. There were seven other partisan statewide races on the ballot that year1, and Democrats won them by margins ranging from 10 points (U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer was reelected by that margin) to 20.3 (State Treasurer Bill Lockyer). Newsom also did better than Harris, for that matter, winning his race for Lieutenant Governor by 11.2 points — although that was less than Jerry Brown’s reelection margin (12.9 points) for the top job.

We can also compare Newsom and Harris against the margins achieved by Democratic presidential candidates in California. For instance, Newsom’s five margins in statewide races are: +11.2 points (2010), +14.4 (2014, his re-election as lieutenant governor), +23.9 (his first run as governor in 2018), +23.8 (the 2021 recall election) and +18.4 (in his last race in 2022). However, in the five presidential elections from 2008 through 2024, Democrats won California by an average of 25.3 points, better than any of Newsom’s finishes.

Newsom hasn’t been at any risk of losing in California, but he’s consistently been underperforming the presidential benchmark.2

Introducing SB Scores

Let’s try to systemize this. Clare, Galen and I selected 18 Democrats in our Democratic primary “draft” last month. One of them was the comedian Jon Stewart, who has never run for office. But for the other 17, we can compare their electoral track records against Democratic presidential candidates in their states or districts.

For instance, Gallego was elected to the U.S Senate in Arizona by 2.4 points in 2024, while Harris lost to Trump there by 5.5 points. That’s a spread of 7.9 points in favor of Gallego. We’ll call this his Simple Benchmark Score or SB Score.3

If the candidate’s race didn’t happen in a presidential year, there’s a fairly straightforward workaround: we can look at the average of presidential years that immediately preceded and followed it. For instance, Whitmer was reelected by 10.5 points in 2022. By comparison, Joe Biden won Michigan by 2.8 points in 2020, while Harris lost it by 1.4 points in 2024.

Yes, this is conceptually related to the “wins above replacement” type methodologies that some other sites publish. I like some of those methods, like the one at Split Ticket, and don’t like others so much. SB Scores aren’t meant to compete with those; rather, they’re deliberately simple. The goal is just transparency here.4

There is one more adjustment that isn’t quite so simple, but I think is worth making. In cases where we have to compare presidential years to non-presidential years to get our SB Score, we’ll account for changes in the background political environment, as measured by the aggregate popular vote for the U.S. House. For instance, 2012 was a pretty good year for Democrats, while 2014 was a rough one. So in benchmarking a Democrat’s performance in 2014 against Obama’s in 2012, we’ll correct for that.5

One last ground rule. For these 17 candidates, I’ve listed every federal (U.S. Senate or U.S. House) and statewide race where the general election featured exactly one Democrat and exactly one Republican. In other words, I didn’t look at uncontested races, races where the general election was between two Democrats, races where the Democrat was only facing a Libertarian, races where there were multiple Republicans, and so on. I also didn’t look at things like mayoral races or state legislature.

Ready? Here’s every qualifying race I could find for these candidates, who are sorted in the table by the order in which we drafted them.

A few quick notes on these:

• Beshear and Amy Klobuchar have had probably the most consistently impressive results. True, in Beshear’s case, Southern states can have a soft spot for Democrats in statewide offices that they won’t get replicated for federal offices like Senate or president. But if there’s a Mr. Electability in the 2028 field, it should be him, not Newsom.

• Gallego was beating his presidential baselines in his House races even before he reached the Senate in 2024. His Arizona colleague Mark Kelly also had a notably high SB Score (+10.4) in his 2022 re-election.

• Shapiro got a terrific +18.0 SB Score in 2022, though it came against an awful Republican candidate. But he was also positive in his two wins for Attorney General.

• For Whitmer, the 2022 re-election margin was very impressive; her 2018 result was good too, but came with more of a tailwind at Democrats’ back in an anti-Trump midterm.

• Although I had some praise for Jon Ossoff in the NYT interview, Warnock’s SB Scores are actually slightly better. Ossoff’s aren’t bad, but the 2017 special election in Georgia’s 6th congressional district that put him on the map — even though he lost — doesn’t look so impressive in retrospect given that the district was trending hard blue, and Lucy McBath would win it outright in 2018.

• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s SB Scores are decent, with two plus years and two minus years. You can make critiques of her electability, and maybe she’s a very Queens-specific type of candidate, but her performances in her district have been fine to good.

• As discussed here, Pete Buttigieg’s mayoral races in South Bend would score reasonably well, but they’re outside of our scope. His one statewide race for Indiana State Treasurer in 2010 does not get a good rating, however. While I’m of the view that more moderate candidates are generally more electable, what you’d really like to see is proof of concept in the form of a signature big win or two. You have that with candidates like Gallego, Whitmer and Shapiro, but not really with Mayor Pete.

After alligators drag their prey into the water, they’ll perform what’s known as a death roll, repeatedly rotating their body 360 degrees to dismember the poor creature in their jaws. Being bitten by an alligator isn’t ideal to begin with, but the death roll makes an already bad situation worse because it disorients the prey animal and makes it harder to fight back or escape.1

The same sort of thing can happen to a political party. A short-term bad beat can easily become a death spiral that turns a well-funded, competent state party into a shell of its former self. The vicious cycle of losing races, losing money, and losing out on quality candidates makes a comeback harder and harder.

Take Florida (whose state reptile, of course, is the American alligator). Republicans have held a trifecta in the state since 19992 and Democrats won their last majority in Florida’s Congressional delegation in 1988. But 25 years ago, it was still the archetypal swing state.

George Bush won Florida by 537 votes in 2000 in a race that came down to butterfly ballots, overseas votes, and the Supreme Court stopping a recount.3 A decade later, Barack Obama carried Florida by not-much-less narrow margins of 2.8 and 0.9 points. But then the losses for Democrats started to stack up:

• 2012 was the last year Florida elected a Democratic U.S. Senator. Incumbent Bill Nelson even lost in 2018 in what was otherwise a strong Democratic year.

• Donald Trump has won the state three times in a row, and by a larger margin each time.

• Republicans have held two-thirds supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature since 2022.

If you’re a Democrat, you might look at this data and be tempted to write off Florida as a permanent Republican stronghold. And that’s increasingly the consensus among nonpartisan political observers, too. On paper, Florida is one of a number of “reach states” that could be competitive if there’s a sufficiently large blue wave this November. Its partisan baseline based on our current generic ballot average and the results of recent elections is “just” R +4.9, similar to Iowa, Texas, and Ohio. However, traders at Polymarket give Democrats only a 13 percent chance of winning the Senate race in Florida — less than half their chance in those other states. And for that matter, less than Alaska, which has a partisan baseline of R +8.2.

And while Democrats might be happy enough to swap a competitive Florida for a competitive Alaska in their bid to reclaim the Senate in 2026, the Sunshine State is a much bigger problem for their long-term future. Mid-decade projections of changes to the Electoral College map don’t have a stellar track record, but Florida, Texas, and Arizona are projected to gain seats.4 Where will those seats come from? Some combination of shrinking blue states like New York and California, and the Blue Wall.

Democrats will still have their share of winning maps in 2032, but Florida being this far from the tipping point — meaning that it would be competitive only in the event of a blowout where the Electoral College was already secure — considerably constrains their options.

Party registration data has shifted against Florida Democrats

Why the pessimism? Some of it is based on hard data. The percentage of registered Florida voters affiliated with the Democratic Party has plunged from 69 percent in 1972 to just 31 percent in 2025. Part of that decrease was driven by more Floridians registering as “no party affiliation” or with a minor party. (About 29 percent of registered Florida voters fall into that bucket, compared with just 3.4 percent in 1972). But since 2020, the share of Republican registrants has jumped from 35 percent to 41 percent.

These changes reflect both migration patterns and current residents switching parties. Post-COVID, Florida became one of the fastest-growing states in the US. Based on crude stereotyping — Florida is a coastal, very multicultural state — you might expect that to help Democrats. Instead, between 2018 and 2023, about 45 percent of those new residents who were previously registered to vote in another state registered as Republicans in Florida, while only 24 percent registered as Democrats.

But that only explains part of the shift: “some of the migration stuff [has]... been overplayed. It’s obviously been a thing. But there aren’t that many more registered voters today in Florida than there were in 2020,” said Steve Schale, who has worked in Florida Democratic politics since before the party’s collapse. Perhaps the bigger problem for Democrats is that Florida’s heavily Hispanic (especially Cuban-American) and not-very-college-educated population has been an ideal recipe for a red shift in recent years. According to the exit polls, Hispanic voters in Florida moved from D +27 in 2016 to R +16 in 2024. Have Democrats gained ground among white college-educated voters in the state? Sure. But voters without college degrees have moved 16 points toward Republicans over the past three presidential cycles.

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Is this all the FDP’s fault?

Still, these partisan registration shifts have happened in other states, too. Schale thinks that “when you look at states like North Carolina… Pennsylvania … [and] a lot of states that have partisan voter registration… you’ve seen things go the wrong way” much like they’ve done in Florida. In 2024, newly registered voters in Arizona were an R +11 group, and in North Carolina, they were R +1.6. But in Florida, there’s been a clearer connection between the voter registration numbers and increasingly poor topline outcomes for Democrats. Why?

I’ll start with a caveat: it’s easy to overestimate how much leverage a state political party has over electoral outcomes. A big part of Florida’s rightward shift would have been nearly impossible for the Florida Democratic Party (FDP) to prevent, no matter how optimally it was run.

But if you read headlines about Florida politics (or, like me, were a political science undergrad in Tallahassee) the most common thing you hear about the FDP is that it’s a complete and total mess full of ineffectual grifters. (I’m barely exaggerating here). Here’s a quick list of facts that might make you question the party’s decision-making:

• Their 2022 gubernatorial nominee was former Republican governor Charlie Crist, who came over to the blue side in 2012 (after a brief stint as an independent) and had already run unsuccessfully statewide for the Senate in 2010 and again for governor in 2014.

• The person whom Crist beat in the 2022 Democratic primary (Nikki Fried) now runs the FDP.

• In 2018, Democrats nominated Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum in the gubernatorial race. He lost by only 0.4 points, but that probably came down to an FBI investigation of corruption in Tallahassee City Hall that overshadowed his campaign.5

• There’s a steady stream of splashy headlines about Democratic state legislators leaving the party.

Still, the answer is more complicated than “the FDP is run by idiots.” No political party is perfect, and the Republican Party of Florida has its fair share of dysfunction. But at least Republicans are still raising money in the state, while Democrats aren’t.

Intentionally hollowing out your party is bad

In the fourth quarter of 2025, the Florida GOP raised $7.9 million. How much did the FDP raise? A comparatively paltry $1.7 million. The top Democratic contender for Florida governor this year (David Jolly) has raised more than $3 million so far, which doesn’t look bad until you compare it to Republican frontrunner Byron Donalds’ $45 million.

And the GOP’s fundraising advantage isn’t new. Former Florida House member Alan Williams told me that in 2018 — when Democrats nearly defeated Ron DeSantis — “we didn’t have enough resources to get to the finish line, and not only in the governor’s race, but in a lot of the different House races.”

Some of this may reflect poor morale: it’s not exactly surprising that money would dry up when a party goes on a generational losing streak. “I think a lot of that money is being shifted to other states that are in play,” said Williams. If you’re a donor, why would you waste money on yet another Florida loss?

But Florida Democrats have also spent the money they have raised oddly. After Obama’s win in 2008, Florida Democrats made the decision to direct money away from the FDP toward an alliance of donor-backed groups that would work to elect Democratic candidates. According to Schale, who was involved in those talks, the idea was that “if we stand up some… organization that’s focused towards Puerto Ricans, that they’ll understand how to talk to Puerto Ricans better than the Democratic Party ever could.”

These organizations did raise and spend a meaningful amount of money, at least initially. Still, it was probably a poor choice to essentially defund the state party instead of emulating the massive, centralized party operations that helped Obama win the state twice. “We as a state have not built partisan infrastructure, really at all, in any meaningful way,” said Schale.

It’s not that these groups are uniquely ineffective — although they can push the party in a more progressive direction that isn’t always helpful — they’re just the wrong tool for the job. Unlike the FDP, they can’t directly coordinate with candidates, nor can they engage in partisan organizing. Schale said he didn’t “understand why you wouldn’t want to invest in a structure that’s going out and registering voters in a partisan way, having those conversations in a partisan way, and in supporting candidates and building that… kind of field operation that is partisanly-focused.”

Repairing the damage now will require an enormous commitment of time and money, a tough sell when Democrats have so little success in Florida to point to on the scoreboard. Schale told me that when people ask him about running for state party leadership, his first question is “are you going to raise me $10 million? Because if you’re not going to raise me $10 million then what’s the fucking point?”

And when money is that scarce, you need to be especially careful about how you use your resources. What you probably shouldn’t do is spend big on unwinnable races or try to compete for every possible seat. If you’ve picked up on the theme of this article, you’ll already suspect that’s exactly what the FDP tends to do. In 2024, they made a big deal about contesting every seat in the state legislature. We’re “an inch deep and a mile wide as it relates to the resources,” said Williams.

Last year, Democrats raised about $15 million for the special elections in Florida’s 1st and 6th Congressional Districts. Did they overperform? Yes. But they still lost both races, and it wasn’t particularly close. Democrats did get a win in the Miami mayor’s race late last year. But messaging about off-year local victories and overperforming in losses can only get you so far.

Moreover, most of that money came from out of state. For example, after losing his special election in the 6th District, Josh Weil launched a campaign for U.S. Senate. Before dropping out due to a health problem, only 12 percent of individual contributions to his Senate campaign came from in-state donors.

The research we’ve conducted for our midterm model suggests that out-of-state donations provide much less of a positive signal than in-state ones. And that could be a problem for Democrats this year, too. True, Trump impeachment whistleblower Alexander Vindman, who moved to the state in 2023, raised a bunch of cash when he threw his hat in the Senate ring. But it’ll take more than Resistance hype to carry Democrats across the finish line. Itemized data for Vindman isn’t available yet, but searches for Vindman’s name in Google Trends data is about twice as high per capita in D.C. as in his new home state.6

It might be that the party needs to start with a more attainable goal: getting out of the superminority in the state legislature. Picking up the two state senate seats and/or five state house seats needed to make that happen will be easier if money flows mostly to competitive races instead of an everything-everywhere-all-at-once approach.

Any additional leverage in the state legislature is going to be especially important now that Florida is following Texas in a mid-decade redistricting push, with a special map-redrawing session scheduled for April. Florida’s map already favors the GOP, but a new map could put a final nail in the FDP’s coffin by adding another three or so Republican seats.7 Focusing on rebuilding the party from the ground up could also help the Democrats develop a better farm system, rather than relying on retreads like Crist or relatively new arrivals like Vindman in statewide races.

If “getting out of the superminority so we can maybe soften the blow of mid-decade redistricting” sounds like a sad goal, that’s because it is. All of these problems — a lack of high-profile wins, poor morale, bad decision-making, a lack of money, a failure to develop compelling candidates, and Florida’s increasingly entrenched reputation as a red state8 — tend to be self-reinforcing. Hence, the death spiral. It took Florida Democrats a decade to get into this situation. Barring a miracle the likes of which the state hasn’t seen since the 1997 Marlins, it will probably take them a similar length of time to get out of it.

Couple of quick announcements before our main event today.

• Given all the turmoil in the media, I’m going to reopen our job listing for an Associate Editor for two more weeks (through Feb. 24). This is a part-time position initially, but it could grow into full-time down the road. There are a few promising candidates already; if you’re in this bucket, we’ll be in touch soon to set up a time for an interview in early March. But this is an important role for us, so I wanted to widen the net a little bit. The Associate Editor role has more specific requirements than for past positions we’ve hired for — we really need someone with at least some real-world, hands-on editing experience. If that describes someone you know, please don’t hesitate to pass the listing along!

• Also, we’re overdue for another SBSQ soon — so you can submit questions here. Since the January version spilled into multiple parts, this one will probably be on the shorter side, or maybe a lightning round edition.

Harris wasn’t a “centrist”, though that oversimplifies the issue

One of my pet peeves in the Great Moderation Wars is when I see the claim that Kamala Harris ran as a centrist. What actually happened is that Harris ran a largely substance-free campaign, hoping to win on vibes, quietly disavowing some of her past progressive positions without explaining why she’d changed her mind or replacing them with much of anything. The one notable exception was Harris’s convention speech, where she took a more assertive, notably male-coded approach, but she quickly abandoned those themes.1 At no point did she take any costly signal that would have risked offending any major Democratic constituency, left or center. And she couldn’t identify a single mistake that she or Joe Biden had made.2

So most voters defaulted to the assumption that Harris was left-wing — a rather reasonable assumption based on her very liberal voting record in the Senate and the aggressively progressive presidential campaign she ran in 2019. Not to mention that she’d been vice president for four years and the Biden-Harris administration had been quite progressive too. And yes, $20+ million in “Kamala is for they/them” ads helped to entrench this perception. But the whole reason the ad was effective was that what seemed like a hyperbolic Republican attack — Harris really wanted taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for prisoners?!? — was attested to by Harris’s own past words and statements.

Even if you personally think that Harris is a centrist, you’re in a substantial minority. In fact, surveys conducted by YouGov in late 2025 found that 37 percent of voters characterized Harris as “far-left”, the same percentage who said that about the new New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Another 38 percent of voters described Harris as “left” or “center-left”; only 6 percent said she was a centrist.3

To be fair, a considerably higher percentage of voters said they weren’t sure about Mamdani’s ideology than said that about Harris. Among voters who did place the candidates on the ideological spectrum, Mamdani (along with AOC and Bernie Sanders) were seen as more left-wing. But the differences aren’t that big. Suppose you assign a number to each rating on a 100-point scale, so 0 is “far-left”, 50 is “center”, 100 is “far-right”, and so forth. According to the average voter4, Harris rates as a 19.5, (basically, “left” but not “far-left”). Bernie Sanders rates as a 17.0 on the same scale.5 So Harris is actually closer to Bernie in the public’s eyes than she is to, say, Pete Buttigieg (26.4).

What you’re seeing here is how voters place a lot of emphasis on cultural signifiers as opposed to, say, capitalism versus “democratic socialism”. In 2019, Harris’s brand was sort of “Diet Woke”. It didn’t sell and she dropped out well before Iowa. She got Biden’s VP nomination anyway. (This being summer 2020, Democrats were quite open that Harris’s race had been a big factor in the decision.6)

Suddenly, she became the presidential nominee despite having been treated as a political liability by the Biden folks during her tenure in the White House. “Brat Summer” was a fun, Cinderella story, but it didn’t tell voters very much about what Harris stood for. And Harris didn’t tell voters much about what she stood for either! So voters deferred to their priors based on her previous campaign, their expectations based on her race and gender, and the messaging they were hearing from Trump, all of which reinforced one another. To the extent that Harris’s campaign 2024 convinced anyone she was a centrist, it was high-information progressive Democrats, the one group that didn’t want her to moderate!

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What is Liz Cheney Syndrome?

Even as someone who thinks that moderation usually helps, I don’t believe there’s any intrinsic electoral disadvantage from being highly progressive or conservative. Rather, what matters, according to the median-voter theorem and other spatial models of voting, is how closely your views align with those of voters. If you’re running to become mayor of a small, extremely liberal college town, it’s electorally advantageous to be super progressive.

Still, usually ideology is more complicated than this, and voters disagree with one another about how they perceive the candidates. The best candidate, according to this theory, is neither a progressive nor a conservative nor a centrist, but one whom progressives believe is a progressive, centrists believe is a centrist, and conservatives believe is a conservative.

This is hard to pull off, of course. Barack Obama was able to do it to some degree in 2008, when he ran to Hillary Clinton’s left on issues like Iraq but also appealed to centrists and independents with his “post-partisan” rhetoric — though by 2012, Obama lost independents to Mitt Romney and relied heavily on base turnout instead.

Donald Trump’s ideology also has been hard for some voters to pin down, in part because he ran against the Bush-McCain-Romney Republican establishment and flipped around some of the party’s priorities. (Much more right-wing on immigration; less emphasis on abortion or Social Security reform.) In 2016, a large number of voters thought of Trump as a moderate. Even in 2024, more voters thought Harris was “too liberal or progressive” than thought that Trump was “too conservative”. Once he gets into office, voters are quickly disabused of the notion that Trump is anything other than right-wing7 (and not coincidentally, he persistently has a low approval rating). But as a candidate, particularly one who relies on lower-propensity voters who invest less time in following politics, he can be more slippery.

For the most part, though, candidates have the opposite problem. Take Liz Cheney, the former Congresswoman from Wyoming, who was essentially cast out of the Republican Party for her opposition to Trump. She rates right in the middle of the political spectrum according to the YouGov poll with a 48.8 rating on the 100-point scale. That might seem pretty ideal, since voters rate themselves at 49 on average on the same scale.

However, if you look at responses from individual voters on how they compare themselves to Cheney, few found her to be a close fit. Right-leaning voters rated Cheney as a 28.4 on this scale, somewhere between “left” and “center-left”. But left-leaning voters rated Cheney at 65.8, placing her far to their right.

This is an unusually large gap; John Fetterman, by contrast, has a similar overall rating (46.2) to Cheney but seems better able to convince voters that he’s actually a moderate or at least otherwise on their side. And Fetterman is reasonably popular in Pennsylvania, though more so with Republicans than Democrats.

There’s really no home in American politics for true anti-Trump conservatives, however. Cheney has an extremely conservative voting record, and I think it’s pretty nuts to consider her left-wing, but opposition to Trump will get you branded that way by other Republicans. Harris campaigned with Cheney to appeal to this narrow constituency, and I understand the impulse behind it, but Cheney is an unpopular figure and this may have served only to annoy progressives without convincing much of anyone.8

In any event, Liz Cheney Syndrome is the phenomenon of everyone being convinced that you’re their ideological opposite: conservatives think you’re a liberal, liberals think you’re a conservative. Harris has some of these problems, too. Although few voters think she’s a conservative, neither leftists or centrists really see her as an exemplar of their preferences, either.

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In fact, we can quantify this more precisely. For every voter in the YouGov poll, I’ll compare their self-reported ideological rating with their view of each candidate. For instance, say a voter describes themselves as “right” (an 83 on the 100-point scale) and thinks of Harris as “center-left” (33). That’s a gap of 50 points. The lower the average gap, the better, since that means voters think the candidate is more closely aligned with them.

Here’s what that looks like on a chart. (I recognize this is one of the less intuitive charts that we’ve run in the newsletter recently, but we’ll work our way through it.)

The U-shape trendline indicates that, on average, candidates who are seen as being closer to the center are also better matches for voters. It’s something of a myth — often perpetuated by people who argue about politics online and tend to be highly partisan — that there are no moderate voters. In the YouGov poll, in fact, 46 percent of voters self-identified as “center,” “center-left,” or “center-right.”9 Some candidates whom political junkies tend to hate, like Fetterman, are fairly popular with normies. But there are some candidates like Cheney whom nobody sees as a reliable ideological ally.

Harris also has a high average distance from voters, 43.1 points. This is similar to Trump (44.3), who has been losing credibility with any normies who mistook him for a moderate.10

Obama has a considerably better rating than Harris of 39.9, however. (To repeat, lower is better here). Buttigieg has a 37.8. (Maybe he deserves a boost the next time we do a Democratic draft.) Even Bernie (41.9), AOC (42.6), and Zohran (42.9) have (slightly) better ratings than Harris despite being seen as more left-wing. Voters on the left trust them more than they trust Harris, while other voters don’t necessarily perceive that big a difference between them and Harris for the reasons we’ve already covered here.

To some extent, this suggests that politics is a “skill game” and that more successful communicators can convince voters that they’re on their side. Or failing that, they’re at least able to immunize themselves against attacks from their opponents. Because Harris entered the campaign as more of a cipher and her campaign seemed disinterested in standing for much of anything, she was more easily defined by paid Republican advertising and attacks by Trump.

Harris may also have had a harder time as a woman. In general, I think the evidence for women candidates facing an electoral penalty is pretty unpersuasive, as Jerusalem Demsas covers here. In the YouGov poll, however, women candidates (shown with orange diamonds in the chart) were perceived as having a larger average ideological gap by voters.

The difference is statistically significant whether you control for the candidate’s ideology or not. It’s not a large sample of candidates, so I don’t want to take this too far. But women may face the challenge of being more easily typecast, being plugged into some proscribed number of gender roles, and being less trusted when they try to break out of them.

So, do I think Harris would have won if she’d been more assertively centrist — say, actively throwing the left under the bus on an issue or two? Well, it’s hard to know, but honestly probably not. Given that the perception of her as a woke-adjacent progressive was fairly entrenched, I think voters might not have bought it anyway or she’d have been attacked as a flip-flopper.11 To be fair, I think Harris had a very difficult task: overcoming both the unpopular positions she’d taken in 2019/2020 and the unpopularity of her boss. All while trying to become the first woman president. Rather than cycling through various half-hearted attempts to rebrand her, Democrats should probably have chosen another candidate instead.