Following the successful passage of his redistricting referendum in California last November, California Gov. Gavin Newsom began the year as the frontrunner for the 2028 Democratic nomination. But polls suggest that he’s slumping. According to Race to the White House, Newsom’s support among prospective Democratic voters in 2028 has fallen from 25 percent in January to 15 percent today.

That's a fairly big shift, given that not all that much has happened. The California gubernatorial primary was kind of a mess, with Newsom not endorsing a candidate until Xavier Becerra was the lone Democrat left standing. Still, that’s local news and this is a national primary. And redistricting has remained a big story, even if it ended on a slightly bitter note for Democrats.

But these early polls do have some predictive power, believe it or not. Prediction markets have tracked with them, with Newsom’s probability of winning the nomination declining from 35.5 percent on Jan. 1 to 23.3 percent today.

No one opponent has emerged as the obvious alternative. Bettors see the field as wide open, with the top six candidates having less than a 60 percent combined probability of winning the nomination. But it’s worth noting where the biggest gains have come from: Kamala Harris and Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff. Each presents a challenge for Newsom. Harris, who might or might not be serious about running again, is from the same state, and it’s hard to find much daylight between her and Newsom on policy. And Ossoff, you could argue, mogs Newsom in the “good-looking white guy” category, only with youth on his side and the credential of actually having won elections in a swing state.

If you ask me, though, the reason for Newsom’s decline is simple: this is reversion to the mean. He doesn’t have a particularly persuasive argument for being the nominee, and his early support may reflect name recognition as much as anything else.

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Newsom is as “establishment” as it gets

As the governor of the nation’s largest state1, Newsom is the logical “next-in-line” candidate for the establishment faction of the Democratic Party. He’s perhaps also the best-known Democrat who isn’t Harris or 80+ years old (Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders). But this comes at a time when that establishment is highly unpopular, including with Democratic voters.

Last year, Newsom made a few conspicuous moves toward a more “heterodox”, centrist side by inviting people like Charlie Kirk on his podcast and shifting to the right on transgender athletes. And in January, he announced his opposition to California’s proposed wealth tax that might appear on this November’s ballot.

These moves, although not necessarily popular with Democratic primary voters, might suggest a candidate trying to break out of the establishment box. But Newsom’s strategy has been a little contradictory. Who was one of his most recent podcast guests? Hunter Biden, the pardoned son of the former president.

Indeed, as Axios notes, Newsom has made a show of embracing Biden and his legacy — somewhat ironically given that Newsom essentially ran a shadow campaign against Biden in 2022. The Biden admiration isn’t new, however. Last October, Newsom described Biden as “one of the most successful presidents in the last century.”

We’ve written a lot about Biden and his legacy at Silver Bulletin, and I’ve urged Democrats to get over it and move past him. Newsom is conspicuously doing the opposite.

Because it’s not as though voters are warming to Biden’s legacy, as they sometimes do for former presidents. In fact, CNN just released a poll of favorability ratings for living presidents. Only 30 percent of voters had a favorable impression of Biden, actually lower than the 38 percent approval rating that Biden left office with. By comparison, Donald Trump had a 34 percent favorability rating in the poll, Bill Clinton was at 38 percent, George W. Bush was at 42, and Barack Obama is the only actually popular former president with a 57 percent positive rating.

As you might imagine, voters who do hold a favorable view of Biden are nearly all partisan Democrats. Among self-identified Democrats in the poll, Biden has a 71 percent favorability rating. But it’s just 51 percent among voters who merely lean toward the Democratic Party.2 And it’s just 20 percent among independents — compared to 56 percent for Obama. (It probably hasn’t helped that the Biden family is constantly making news in the wrong way, by re-litigating the Democratic Party’s decision to push Biden aside.)

True, every Democratic candidate is going to face difficult decisions on issues like trans rights or policing where the median Democratic primary voter is well to the left of the median general election voter. Biden is a strange hill to die on, however. A 71 percent favorability rating is far from unanimous support even among Democrats. It’s not like Biden is particularly well-liked by the left, either. And if 2028 is a “change election”, like most elections are, it’s hard to see why you’d embrace an 83-year-old whose legacy voters just rejected in 2024 when his vice president went head-to-head against Trump.

As an aside, I’d note how popular Obama remains with Democrats — a 96 percent favorability rating! Now and then, I’ll see some contrarian take from a self-described liberal on Twitter or Bluesky claiming that the base wants to move beyond Obama. But that’s deeply out of touch with the polling. Obama is basically the only Democrat who still unifies the various factions of the party, including younger voters and more left-wing ones. Indeed, Obama has his fair share of imitators, including Ossoff and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who can mimic his cadence.

So it’s at least a little bit weird that Newsom describes Biden as “one of the most successful presidents in the last century” when far more Democrats would describe Obama that way. In the CNN poll, 30 percent of voters listed Obama as the president they admire most; just 1 percent of respondents said that of Biden.

But let’s get back to the question posed by the headline.

Newsom is running as a factional candidate of the #Resistance Libs

In my piece on Heather Cox Richardson, I identified three main factions of the Democratic Party. First, The Left, who have candidates they prefer to Newsom like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Second, the more centrist-y Abundance Libs. Newsom has been friendly with them at times, going on Abundance co-author Ezra Klein’s podcast for instance. But they tend to have a lot of critiques both of Newsom’s performance in office — Abundance is basically a book about the failures of governance in California — and his electability.

Last but by no means least — they’re possibly the largest faction — are the #Resistance Libs. They’re progressive but usually not “far left”. Demographically (like Richardson), they’re older, college-educated and female-leaning. But they tend to really root for the blue team. They’re less ideological than they are partisan, a distinction that sometimes gets lost. They’re the group that tends to feel Biden was unfairly railroaded out because of what they think of as overblown media fixation on Biden’s age.

Although Biden isn’t popular with pretty much anyone — even among Black voters, only 53 percent have a favorable view of him — you can find some echoes of the #Resistance Lib constituency in the CNN poll on Biden. He’s relatively more popular with women than men, with voters aged 45 or older, and with college-educated voters who frequently consume political news, all #Resistance Lib hallmarks. (Note that the numbers in this table are among all voters, not just Democrats.)

Meanwhile, while none of the factions were happy about 2024, they each have different theories of the case for how Democrats can get a better result in 2028. The Left thinks the party should move, well, left, especially on distributional and economic issues. The Abundance Libs think the party should tone down culture war issues that poll poorly and prove that they can govern more effectively.

And the #Resistance Libs? They basically deny that Democrats have a substantive problem at all. Instead, their leading theories of 2024 are that Democrats lost because 1) they didn’t fight hard enough, both against Trump and against unfair media coverage and 2) because Kamala Harris was a Black woman.

Newsom resolves each of these concerns, although the white guy part is left unstated. HE’S A FIGHTER WHO TWEETS IN ALL CAPS LIKE TRUMP. AND HE’S A WINNER.

To be clear, Newsom’s redistricting play was both substantive and smart, and he deserves a lot of credit for it. Also to be clear, the Republican Party is likely to have a hell of a mess on its hands in choosing its nominee in 2028 and will face massive headwinds unless Trump magically becomes more popular in the second half of his lame duck term. Newsom can win and is probably no worse than a toss-up against JD Vance or whomever.

But Newsom’s electability argument is weak. Polls find that Democratic voters see Newsom as highly “electable”, but his margins in California have been underwhelming, and the Golden State is the furthest thing from a swing state. True, I don’t expect primary voters to be making Wins Above Replacement calculations, but candidates like Ossoff (and Shapiro, depending on how his re-election goes) obviously have stronger arguments in the electability department by virtue of over-performing in swing states.

So my theory is that Newsom’s noisy support for Biden is intended as a signal to the most partisan #Resistance Libs — as an effort at reassuring them that they were right about 2024.

The most effective signals are often costly signals, however. Most voters are extremely skeptical about Biden’s performance in office. The better strategy is probably to invoke some nostalgia for the one Democratic president (Obama) that voters actually do have warm feelings for, while also promising change, generational and otherwise. But someone like Ossoff is in a stronger position to make this case than Newsom.

Maybe Newsom realizes this: that he’s never going to effectively rebrand himself as anything other than a capital-E Establishment Democrat, so he might as well embrace it. It might not be the worst choice as a matter of tactics. But it’s also a sign of weakness. Newsom is never going to be the favorite candidate of the Left (especially after opposing the wealth tax) or the Abundance Libs. But if he can hold the #Resistance Libs, he’ll have a high floor in the Democrats’ highly proportional primary system.

What happens from there? Maybe the same thing that happened for Biden in 2020 and John Kerry in 2004. The rest of the party rallies around the early frontrunner as the “least-worst” choice after an early primary win or two, fleeing to safety when presented with alternatives that seem equally problematic. Newsom has more raw political talent than Kerry or Biden, frankly. And it’s a formula that has worked before in the Democratic primaries — but also one that tends to produce highly triangulating and thoroughly mediocre general election candidates.

In 2015, I made the biggest mistake of my career by being too dismissive of Donald Trump’s chance of winning the Republican nomination. But I had my reasons, even if they weren’t great ones. The “lesson” of 2012 had been that populist or insurgent candidates — Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, you name it — could surge for a time in the polls, but wouldn’t survive sustained scrutiny. The Republican establishment always got its way in the end in the form of candidates like Mitt Romney.

One forecasting lesson here, and something I’m usually better about, is to avoid becoming fixated on stylized narratives like these. In other words, be wary of declaring things to be iron laws of politics when you’re dealing with a small sample and the strategies are still evolving. The entire process we use for nominating presidents is relatively new, having basically begun in 1972 with the McGovern-Fraser reforms.

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Another reason for my misplaced confidence in “not Trump” was academic research in the form of books like “The Party Decides,” which provided empirical support for the idea that “party elites” tend to get what they want. Furthermore, there was a quantifiable signal of this: endorsements.

But if you actually try to build a real statistical model of the presidential nomination process, as I did in 2020, you’ll find that while endorsements do provide some signal, the data is pretty ambiguous, and it’s best not to rely on any single indicator.1 Even Romney’s win in 2012 wasn’t all that decisive. Cain, Santorum and Gingrich were not exactly a murderers’ row of candidates. While they didn’t come super close, Santorum won 11 contests, and Gingrich won two.2 In real time, I don’t think I spent enough time thinking about questions like “what happens if a populist comes along who’s 10x more charismatic than Rick Santorum?” (not a high bar).

Donald Trump’s win in 2016 wasn’t all that decisive either — there was some resistance. He lost Iowa to Ted Cruz, and as late as April or May, a contested convention still seemed plausible. Cruz even refused to endorse Trump at the RNC, drawing boos. During the general election, many prominent Republicans denounced Trump in October following the “Access Hollywood” tape, perhaps figuring that the election was a lost cause. And Trump’s cabinet in 2016 (including Vice President Mike Pence) consisted of a fair number of “establishment types”.

But Trump has consolidated his power over the Republican Party over the past 10 years. In 2024, he won every Republican primary except for Vermont and Washington, D.C. That came despite a fairly star-studded list of names running against him, including Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Pence.

My interview with Seth Masket

Trump’s election in 2016 and return to power in 2024 are one of the most important stories in American political history. Sometimes it’s worthwhile to think about it through a historical/political science lens instead of the latest breaking news chyron on CNN.

So I wanted to provide that context before introducing the video3 of my Substack Live on Thursday with Seth Masket, a political scientist at the University of Denver and the author of the excellent new book, “The Elephants in the Room: How Trump Voters Seized the Party from Republican Leaders.”

As Seth’s subtitle implies, Republican voters played a role in all of this. The establishment lost credibility after John McCain and Romney lost consecutive general elections. Trump zagged on immigration while the party establishment zigged toward the center. The choices it offered voters were growing stale. Even though George W. Bush had left office as one of the most unpopular presidents ever, it thought Americans might want a new Bush: Jeb!

However, Trump has also benefited from not exactly always playing within the rules. Seth’s previous book, “Learning from Loss”, covered how Democrats responded to the defeat of Hillary Clinton. Parties rarely want to renominate losing candidates, for one thing. But those learning mechanisms are fundamentally broken when you falsely claim that the election was stolen from you.

Trump has also frequently behaved like a “mob boss”, relying on threats and coercion, and Republicans sometimes even fearing for their physical safety by opposing Trump.

All of this makes Republicans a deeply unhealthy party. Still, there’s a lot to consider, including whether the GOP could have averted Trump’s nomination in 2016 by consolidating around a single alternative4 — and what’s next for the Democratic Party as its voters also become estranged from the party establishment. I hope you’ll enjoy the conversation as a little break from the news cycle (and the World Cup).

We had this conversation yesterday afternoon before the results were known1, but Graham Platner is now the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate. With 90 percent of the vote counted, he has 72 percent compared to 19 percent for former Governor Janet Mills — who suspended her campaign in April but made some half-hearted efforts recently to remind voters that she was still on the ballot — and 9 percent for other candidates. That Platner share has been falling slightly as more Election Day votes are counted — early voting began before Platner’s latest series of scandals — but I’d expect it winds up north of 70 percent. Turnout was decent: we just passed 200,000 votes counted, exceeding the 163,000 ballots cast in the Democratic Senate primary in 2020.

I’m not quite sure how to evaluate that performance relative to “expectations”, and I’ve never loved playing the expectations game. For what it’s worth this result was quite close to what prediction markets were expecting at the start of the day. “Platner won by 50 points on high turnout!” is one way to frame it; “30 percent of Democrats protested Platner despite his essentially running uncontested” is another.2

Meanwhile, prediction markets have Democrats’ chances of winning the general election in Maine rebounding after a sharp drop following Platner’s sexting scandal.

This isn’t a particularly easy race to forecast. Maine is an unusual state that often isn’t correlated well with national trends. Indeed, it has become somewhat bluer recently, defying the pattern of rural white voters becoming redder. But it has a recent history of lowballing Republicans in polling — and particularly Susan Collins, Platner’s opponent.

Platner is an unusual candidate; it goes without saying, between the lack of elected experience and the scandals — but it’s also easy to see why he strikes some voters as genuinely charismatic and a break from the norm. You could argue that Collins is unusual too, just by virtue of being basically the only surviving blue-state Republican Senator in the Trump Era.

Polls suggest that the sexting scandal has made a dent in Platner’s numbers, however. In three polls since the latest scandal, he leads by an average of 2 points, versus 7 points beforehand. That includes a Platner internal poll — campaign internals typically exaggerate their candidate’s standing by about 4 points of vote margin — although, for that matter, it also includes a Collins internal.3

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One mode we sometimes use at Silver Bulletin is “Nate’s bad tweets, explained.” (Here’s an example.) But when I expressed my frustration with California’s incredibly slow vote-counting process earlier this week, I was surprised at how little dissent there was from Democrats, Republicans, or pretty much anyone.

Of course, we might want to analyze the implications of California’s elections on Tuesday under the state’s top-two primary system. But we can’t do that because we’re on the third day since the election and the finish line is not in sight yet for several key races.

Rather than editorialize too much further, though, we assigned Eli to pull some data. Indeed, California is even more of a negative outlier than I’d realized. –Nate Silver

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California has few (good) excuses for its slow vote counting

by Eli McKown-Dawson

It’s been three days since the polls closed in California’s primary elections, and we still don’t have race calls for governor, Los Angeles mayor, and for multiple salient US House contests. Did all of those races come down to a few hundred votes and get bogged down in recounts and litigation? Nope. Was there an earthquake or Succession-esque ballot fire that threw vote counting into chaos? Also no.

In fact, this outcome was entirely expected. And that’s the whole problem.

Before Election Day, many newsrooms put out similar articles explaining that tight races “could take days or even weeks” to call. That’s because California is notoriously slow at counting its ballots. In 2024, it took California until November 8 (three days after Election Day) to get just 70 percent of its ballots counted. Across all 50 states, the average share of the vote counted by that date was more than 95 percent, putting California squarely in last place. Rest assured, The Golden State did eventually hit that 95 percent mark… a full 10 days later.

Of course, statewide general elections — like those for president, governor, and US Senator — are called quickly in California, even though the vote count is slow, because the state isn’t particularly competitive. But close races are another story. In 2024, races for California’s 22nd and 27th districts took a week to call1 — and the 13th District took about a month! The country has frequently had to wait on California to see which party won control of the House.

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That would seem to indicate there are major issues with California’s election administration, or at least some minor issues that need improvement, right? Not according to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber.2 “I know the value of being fast for some folks,” she told CalMatters. “For me, accuracy is far more important.” She’s not alone. There’s an attitude in some (mainly Californian and mainly Democratic) circles that California’s slow vote counting is indicative of a state that takes its time to carefully count every vote and ensure maximum accessibility. Here’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer on election night: “It might take some time to figure out where this is going. We’re going to wait until every ballot is counted. We’re going to give democracy time to work.”

To be fair, there are real reasons why you’d expect California’s count to take longer than other states. One explanation you’ll hear often is that the state is massive. With nearly 40 million residents, California would rank as the 4th largest economy in the world if it were treated as a country. Los Angeles County alone has a larger population than 40 states. California also sends a mail ballot to every registered voter and most voters — about 80 percent in 2024 — do choose to vote by mail. Those ballots take more time to tabulate, in part because election workers need to verify that the signature on each mail ballot matches the signature on file for that voter.

And California is quite permissive about when those mail ballots need to arrive. As long as the ballot is postmarked by Election Day, it can arrive up to one week later and still be counted. That means election offices will be getting new primary ballots to count through next Tuesday. Those late ballots don’t just slow down the count; they can also produce strange-looking results with blue or red skews. In this primary, Democrats on average returned their ballots later than Republicans, so the first-counted results from Election Day and early mail ballots were significantly redder than the eventual final result will be.

But none of these factors have anything to do with the accuracy Weber cares about. Vote tabulation is highly accurate across all 50 states, even those that manage to count everything on election night. And none of them are particularly good enough excuses to explain the extent of California’s slowness.

I went to college in another large state: Florida. When you talk to election officials in The Sunshine State, the 2000 election always looms large. Aside from butterfly ballots and recounts, the big story is how Florida’s election administration improved after that trainwreck. Fast forward 25 years, and Florida now manages to count 99 percent of its ballots within a few hours of polls closing, in part because election officials can process ballots before the polls close. And they are able to accomplish this feat of incredible speed with a sizable proportion of mail votes — about 27 percent in 2024.3

California is a massive outlier relative to other states and other countries

California likes to tout that it’s larger than many countries, but most developed countries are able to wrap up nationwide elections more quickly than California can tabulate its votes. Colombia held a presidential election on Sunday, and 99.98 percent of the result was in on Monday morning. Japan also counts most of its votes overnight.4 And in the UK (not exactly a poster child for state capacity), you can generally expect to have calls for all 650 parliamentary seats the morning after the election.

How about India? It’s one of the few places that can claim to have even more complexities than California. In fact, elections there are conducted in multiple stages. But it did manage to count 640 million votes in a day in 2024 once the final phase was over.

Indeed, the more you scrutinize this, the fewer excuses California has. It is not the state with the most mail voting, nor is it the state with the latest mail ballot return deadline. Mail-voting states such as Oregon, Washington, and Colorado count slowly relative to the US average, but they’re all faster than California.

As The New York Times Editorial Board pointed out earlier this year, Colorado is able to mail ballots to all registered voters while maintaining speedy counting in part because it limits late ballots to exceptional circumstances (such as military troops outside the state). That might sound “uninclusive,” but the share of California ballots rejected for lateness moved from just 0.5 percent in 2012 (before the one-week grace period was implemented) to … the exact same 0.5 percent in 2022. You can make voting accessible without bending over backward to accommodate the tiny share of people affected by extending the mail ballot receipt deadline.

What about accuracy and overall quality of election administration? California comes up short there too. There’s no evidence that voter fraud or other election administration issues are any less prevalent in California than in faster counting states. Based on the Elections Performance Index — a project that compares election administration quality across states — California ranked 41st in 2024.5 So the state isn’t slower and better: it’s slower and (often) worse.

Slow counting fuels conspiracy theories

The fallback argument is that speed just doesn’t matter, and the only people who care about California’s weeks of counting are election junkies (guilty as charged) and conspiracy theorists worried about voter fraud. Of course, that’s true to some extent. Many Californians are fine with their timely presidential and statewide decisions, and don’t care that the insurance commissioner primary still hasn’t been called. But these delays do contribute to voter fraud conspiracy theories. Don’t believe me? Here’s the President of the United States early yesterday morning:

In a rare moment of bipartisanship, Gov. Gavin Newsom agreed, writing in a letter to election officials that “We must acknowledge that the longer the voting count takes, the more mis- and disinformation spreads.” Intuitively, that makes sense, especially when there’s a partisan dimension to when voters return their ballots. It’s unlikely that Democrats will get locked out of California’s 6th district, but right now, the Democratic candidate is in third place because only 53 percent of the vote is in. That’s confusing if you aren’t glued to election Twitter. There’s also evidence that longer-than-expected vote-counting times can reduce trust in elections.

It doesn’t have to be this way. And the solution is not to stick your head in the sand and say that anyone who complains about California’s sluggishness is fueling conspiracy theories. The state has taken some baby steps — counties now have to finish counting most ballots in 13 days instead of 306 — but it’s not nearly enough. Even putting aside inclusivity concerns, California simply counts the ballots it has too slowly, and its elections offices are underfunded. If you want people to be confident in your electoral system, a good first step is to build one that works properly instead of adding yet another example to the “California is a failed state” pile.

This is going to be a sports-heavy week at Silver Bulletin. No apologies for that, with both the NBA Finals and the World Cup set to start soon. You can find the first part of our NBA Finals preview here on the Knicks. And I think we’re within 48 hours of being ready to publish our World Cup forecasts. (In the meantime, you can find our underlying PELE ratings here.) I’m not much of a hard-sell guy, but we do hope that Silver Bulletin will provide a lot of value over the rest of the year between the sports models and, of course, the midterms.

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Let’s see if we can get away with a quickish politics post, though. Like Matt Yglesias, I have some thoughts on recent developments in the Maine U.S. Senate race, and I figure they belong here rather than on X.

The state of play in Maine

When we last checked in on the Maine race, Graham Platner, the populist oysterman who probably needs no further introduction at this point, had seemingly vanquished Governor Janet Mills in the Democratic Senate primary, with Mills suspending her campaign. The primary is set for next Tuesday, June 9. Over the weekend, however, the Wall Street Journal reported that Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, had flagged sexually explicit texts sent by Platner to a number of women on the messaging platform Kik as being a potential concern for the campaign.

The story is very messy. Platner hasn’t denied the existence of the sexts, but a senior Platner strategist, Morris Katz, reportedly threatened Genevieve McDonald, Platner’s former political director who quit the campaign in October, for speaking with the press. Rather than retracting her claims as Katz demanded, McDonald instead went on the record with them. Katz responded by making an apparent reference to McDonald as an “incompetent, opportunistic” operative who valued “vengeance over decency.”

I’ll be diplomatic and say Katz doesn’t sound like a very nice guy. While I personally don’t care much about a candidate’s personal conduct, so long as it doesn’t impact his performance in office, it’s up to the voters of Maine to decide what exactly is their “fucking business” and what isn’t.

In Maine, the line between the personal and the political can be blurry

No Maine voter, from Kennebunkport to Presque Isle, presumably cares very much about whether Morris Katz is a jerk. But they might have concerns about Platner. So far, Platner has shown an arguably Trump-like resilience to a series of scandals, including a tattoo of the Totenkopf, a Nazi symbol, which Platner got while serving in the Marines in 2007 and had covered up last year.

If voters don’t care about a Nazi tattoo, why would they care about some sexts? Every couple, certainly, has their own boundaries for what is and isn’t acceptable in a relationship and even whether fidelity is expected at all. Gertner, for what it’s worth, has been supportive of her husband. (She has also been paid almost $30,000 by Platner’s campaign.)

However, Platner has spun his story as a redemption arc: that the tattoo and a series of inflammatory Reddit posts were youthful, sometimes drunken, indiscretions. That the sexts were relatively recent calls that narrative into question.

And look, all of us have probably had friends who engaged in infidelity or other indiscretions. Just speaking for myself, I’m a fairly tolerant person — human beings are human beings — but these can yield some tough judgment calls. Maybe you see someone as an occasional “drinking buddy” you don’t want to get too close to; I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that. But if there’s a cluster of bad behavior and no trajectory toward improvement, you may conclude that someone is too toxic or narcissistic to be worth your goodwill. You might also feel betrayed if you thought someone had earned your trust and they turn out to be chronically manipulative.

It’s hard to know how all of this translates when you’re evaluating a candidate for office rather than one to get some beers with. And I know I’m psychoanalyzing. Maine, however (where I’ve spent quite a lot of time) is a state where personal relationships matter and the boundary between the personal and the political isn’t always so clear. The fact that Platner is “relatable” undoubtedly accounted for some of his appeal.

Yglesias pointed out other flaws with Platner, such as his tendency to burn bridges with the Democratic establishment, a risky strategy in a state where he might need every vote. I’m less sure about that, actually. Part of Platner’s appeal, I think, is that he doesn’t come across as a partisan in a state that’s famously nonpartisan, having elected plenty of Democrats, Republicans and independents to office.

You can’t necessarily trust the polling in Maine

Still, Platner has had something of a halo around him because his polling has held up well. He had large leads over Mills before she suspended her campaign and typically led by mid-to-high single digits in matchups against Susan Collins.

These polling leads have scrambled some of the usual intra-Democratic arguments around Platner. Despite being on the left, he’s very unpopular on Bluesky, for instance, while he’s been supported by more “electability” focused types who usually prefer more moderate candidates.

But here’s the thing. It’s a little early to crown Platner with Trump-like Teflon abilities. Platner hasn’t been elected to anything yet, and Maine’s not a state where you should make too many assumptions based on the polls.

In 2020, the last time she was on the ballot, Collins trailed former State Rep. Sara Gideon in almost every poll, but wound up beating Gideon by 8.6 points, making for one of the largest polling errors in our extensive polling database. One could argue that 2020 was an unusual circumstance. Perhaps because of COVID-related behaviors, polls badly overestimated Democrats that year, with Joe Biden just barely holding on to win the key Electoral College states. There was also an important late-breaking development in the race: Collins voted against Amy Coney Barrett, perhaps earning back some moderate cred, and most of the polling predated this.

Maine has also gotten meaningfully bluer as recent transplants to the state have been overwhelmingly from Democratic-leaning voting groups. It voted for Hillary Clinton by just 3 points in 2016, but Kamala Harris by 7 points last year. One other difference: in 2020, ticket-splitting voters in Maine might have assumed that Collins could serve as a check on a newly elected Democratic president in Biden. This time, they know they’re getting two more years of Trump.

However, the tendency for polls to overrate Democrats in Maine has been fairly persistent. Since 2014, in Maine races with two or more polls in the final three weeks, Republicans have beaten their polls by about 4 points on average.

There wasn’t much consistent bias prior to 2014, though Collins substantially outperformed her polls in 2008, even as Barack Obama won the state overwhelmingly. She underperformed her polls in 2002 but still booked a 17-point win.

Maybe none of this matters. Based on Democrats’ substantial lead on the generic ballot plus Maine’s increasingly blue lean, our current benchmark for the state is D +14.6. In other words, you’d expect a “generic” Democrat in the state to beat a “generic” Republican by double digits.

Is Platner such a bad candidate — or is Collins such a good one — that she can overcome that?

Well, there’s precedent. Interestingly enough, in 2020, our model actually pegged Maine as a toss-up rather than buying into Gideon’s polling lead. There are several reasons for that, but the basic story is that the model defaulted more toward “fundamentals” because polling in the state was sparse. And so Collins’s history of winning by landslide margins, and to a lesser extent her bipartisan voting record in Congress (candidates who more often defy their party in Congress tend to overperform electorally) caused it to hedge substantially.

We’ve since tweaked our model to be less sensitive to “candidate quality” factors of any kind and more keyed to raw partisanship, such as expressed by that D +14.6 statewide benchmark. Still, the fundamentals matter some, and they’ll work against Platner in the model. The model will regard Platner’s lack of electoral experience as a problem, and we’ve found that prominent scandals can subtract several points from a candidate’s vote share even in an era when ticket-splitting has become less common.

Furthermore, Maine tends to march to its own drummer. Demographically and politically, Maine is among the biggest outliers and the least correlated with other states, which in the model’s logic tends to make outcomes there highly uncertain. You can’t infer as much from the national picture there as you would in a state like Pennsylvania.

While I suppose I’d still bet on Platner, I’m very curious what the model will say. And I’d note that we absolutely can’t be certain that there aren’t further skeletons in Platner’s closet. Some of the women who received the sexual texts might speak out. (Most users of Kik are much younger than Platner.)

There’s no particular reason for Collins to have leaned into her opposition research file while the Democratic primary is technically still unresolved. And Katz’s defensiveness and the departures of McDonald and other staffers aren’t a great sign either.

So it would take a somewhat unlikely parlay — but, yes, it’s at least plausible that Democrats will have a strong night in November but will blow the race in Maine.

Mills would at least be a lower-variance bet, and that’s probably what you want in a blue state in a blue year. She reminded voters today that she’s still on the ballot. It’s probably too late, with early voting already having been in place for several weeks, though Platner would have until mid-July to withdraw and be replaced by a candidate of the state Democratic Party’s choosing.

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From a certain vantage point, you can argue that May has been an “incredible few weeks for Trump’s political operation,” as the journalist Rachel Bade recently did. Bade cited redistricting wins for Republicans in Virginia and at the Supreme Court, and the ousting of a series of Trump-skeptical Republican incumbents — like Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Thomas Massie of Kentucky — in Republican primaries this month.

Trump may add another notch to his belt on Tuesday in Texas, when Republicans will go to the polls in the runoff of the U.S. Senate primary between incumbent John Cornyn and state attorney general Ken Paxton, whom Trump just endorsed.

But rest assured, readers: this is not our perspective here at Silver Bulletin. Here’s a good rule of thumb to understand why: if Nancy Pelosi somehow did a Freaky Friday-style body swap with Trump, would she have handled this Texas endorsement any differently?

Last time we wrote about the Republican Senate race in Texas, Cornyn was trailing the scandal-plagued Paxton in primary polls. We said the one thing that would give Cornyn a shot at frontrunner status was an endorsement from Trump. Instead, in a move reminiscent of the New York Times’s co-endorsement of Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 Democratic primaries1, Trump endorsed all three Republican candidates. You could call that a nice gesture — and an understandable one because Trump featured prominently on all of their campaign websites. But it of course defeated the entire purpose of an endorsement as an informative signal.

Cornyn outperformed his polls even without Trump’s help and narrowly won a plurality of votes in the primary. But that wasn’t enough to avoid a runoff. So Republicans were staring down the barrel of nearly three more months of an already nasty race between Paxton and Cornyn before they could pivot to the general. To make matters worse, Jasmine Crockett — Republicans’ preferred candidate — lost the Democratic primary to James Talarico.

Let’s remind you of the stakes here. Democrats need to pick up four seats to flip the Senate in November. The comparatively easy pickups are in Maine, where the state’s increasingly blue lean might be enough to overcome both Susan Collins’s track record and Graham Platner’s controversial past, and in North Carolina, a purple-ish state which prediction markets say is more likely than not to turn blue thanks to a strong Democratic nominee in former governor Roy Cooper.

After that, things get harder. Democrats have fighting chances elsewhere, but are no better than a toss-up in any other contest. And one more pickup is not enough: they have to win at least two seats on top of Maine and North Carolina. Putting Texas in play would make for a lot more winning combinations.

So something had to be done, as Republicans were fully aware. Trump jumped into action with the promise of a quick endorsement of one of the two primary survivors and strong encouragement that the non-endorsee should drop out:

Although that Truth Social post played its cards close to the vest, reporting at the time indicated that Trump was leaning toward endorsing Cornyn. We don’t say this too often about Trump, but tactically, that seemed like a good call. Cornyn is probably the better general election candidate, and not just because he’s the incumbent.

So what happened? Whether out of frustration that his plan to back Cornyn leaked or because of his usual instincts to improvise, Trump’s speedy endorsement never materialized. The March 17 deadline for one of the two candidates to remove their name from the ballot came and went, and after maneuvering from both sides, it looked like Trump might not endorse anyone. “The impact of him staying out of the race, I think, has been unfortunate because now we’ve spent tens and tens of millions of dollars in a competitive US Senate seat in Texas that could’ve otherwise be used for competitive House seats … against Democrats in the fall,” Texas Republican House member Nathaniel Moran told CNN.

But on Tuesday, Trump finally did endorse Paxton, whom he called a “true MAGA Warrior.” Paxton had already been a slight favorite in prediction markets, but his chances shot up from 60 percent to 95 percent following the news.

Anyone surprised by the flip-flop between Cornyn and Paxton either hasn’t been paying attention to Trump’s previous endorsements or is too plugged in to Beltway inside baseball. The most basic take here is that Trump seems to have questionable taste in candidates. Just like with Herschel Walker in 2022, he chose the loyal but scandal-plagued over the safe “establishment” option.

Is Texas truly a toss-up?

In previous cycles, these Trump-backed candidates have seriously underperformed. And Trump’s endorsement of Paxton comes at a time when Trump’s political standing is probably at its all-time low: he’s at a net -19.3 in our approval rating tracker, the worst rating for any president at this point in a nonconsecutive term.2

To level-set here: the Texas general election contest is the proverbial case of a rock meeting a hard place. It’s a very red state, having repeatedly defied Democrats’ wishes to “Turn Texas Blue”. It’s the kind of place that has survived blue waves, like in 2018, when Ted Cruz was just far enough ashore to beat Beto O’Rourke by 2.7 points.

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This has been one of those weeks when the hard-working Silver Bulletin staff has devoted most of its hours to some longer-term features — most importantly, the midterm and World Cup models1 — and several of the articles we have planned are in a state of half-finishedness. When this sort of thing happens, it can be easy to feel a sense of substackschuld — the German word for the guilt felt for not having published a newsletter for several days (OK, I made that up).

Giving in to substackschuld sometimes just perpetuates the problem by pushing back everything else on your to-do list. So this was supposed to be a short newsletter that just posted the video of the show Galen, Clare, and I did at Comedy Cellar on Wednesday night (you can find that at the very end). But I talked myself into a full article after reading this excellent post by friend-of-the-newsletter Matt Glassman on “constitutional hardball”.

What is constitutional hardball?

Glassman defines “constitutional hardball” as “using political tactics and strategies that are thoroughly legal under the constitution but flout the basic assumptions about the rules that we all agree upon”: in other words, things that are technically legal, but which violate democratic norms. An example might be Virginia Democrats changing the retirement age for the state supreme court, enabling them to appoint an entirely new court and presumably to overturn the court’s decision to block the state’s redistricting referendum.

Virginia Democrats have abandoned that effort, to which I say, good: I argued at the live show that I really disliked the plan. It felt like a violation of norms: too much of an escalation, the sort of thing that Democrats would blast as exceptionally undemocratic if Republicans did it, for frankly too little gain (just a couple of seats in the House for two years).

And norms matter. Often, they do most of the work. This is not a perfect heuristic, but in any sort of long-term relationship, it’s usually a bad sign when you have to “look at the contract” instead of counting on both sides to just behave “reasonably”.

But what constitutes “hardball” and what’s going “too far” isn’t so straightforward. As you may have noticed, democratic norms have been severely weakened in the United States, and President Trump has not exactly shown much respect for the Constitution.

Were Republicans playing hardball when they threatened to breach the debt ceiling to extract concessions out of Barack Obama? When they refused to hold a confirmation vote on Merrick Garland? When Texas Republicans kicked off a mid-decade redistricting war last summer? I’ve chosen these three examples because the first two preceded Trump, and the last one sort of does: Texas Republicans did basically the same thing under George W. Bush in 2003. This isn’t entirely a new problem or a Trump problem.

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The golden rule of constitutional hardball

And what about some of the ideas Kamala Harris floated this week in what she called a “no-bad-idea brainstorm”? Such as adding Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. as states, or expanding/packing the Supreme Court?

For his part, Glassman — who lives in Virginia and voted against the state’s redistricting amendment out of a sense of principle — is on board with gerrymandering reform and with new states2, but not with court packing. For the most part, I share his intuitions.

But “intuitions” is exactly what they are. Other than finding some way to end the insanity of the current gerrymandering/redistricting prisoner’s dilemma, I don’t think any of these are easy calls, exactly. Puerto Rico and D.C. statehood seem fine/good to me, but I don’t feel that way about the occasional proposals to divide California (or on the GOP side, Texas) into several states. Then again, state boundaries are hardly sacred: there really don’t need to be two Dakotas, and creating them was an explicitly partisan move.

Meanwhile, you can argue that expanding the court would be a tit-for-tat maneuver for the Garland thing — though a more precise and reciprocal retaliation would be Democrats refusing to confirm a Republican president’s nominee should they control the Senate during a GOP presidency. A situation that has roughly a 50/50 chance of coming into play after the midterms, by the way.

Even as someone who thinks of himself as a principled guy, I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with inductive moral reasoning, meaning that you look at the edge-cases (“this feels right, but I don’t think this is OK”) and “work backward” to impute some general principles from them. The better approach, though, usually involves some synthesis of inductive and deductive reasoning: you look at the edge cases to help define the rules, but then consider how the rules would define the other edge cases, and so on until you converge on a point of some coherence. (This all feels weirdly intuitive to me because it’s very similar to the process of creating a statistical model. You neither want to overfit a model —doing too much “gerrymandering”, if you will, around the edge cases — or to underfit one by failing to capture key features of the system.3)

But probably I’m abstracting this too much. Glassman proposes this test of when something constitutes undesirable constitutional hardball:

This can get quite messy, but here’s a rough shorthand test: do you favor instituting your reform when the other side is in power or will otherwise benefit, or only when you are/will? If it’s the latter, that’s a good sign that it’s not a neutral reform, and not likely to be productive in a non-partisan, democracy affirming and republic-strengthening sense.

I like Glassman’s test, but I’d extrapolate a half-step beyond. We might ask: what is the equilibrium that emerges if both sides reciprocate, which they almost inevitably will? Is it a stable equilibrium or one that would potentially oscillate out of control? Or in a more formal philosophical sense, what is the categorical imperative?

If Democrats were to add two new Supreme Court justices, Republicans would probably do the same the next time they held a trifecta. The equilibrium would be that: 1) whenever a party won a trifecta, they’d also gain control of SCOTUS and 2) a Supreme Court with dozens (eventually hundreds, thousands, etc.) of justices. I’m not sure how stable that is, and that certainly doesn’t feel right if you believe in any sense of checks and balances.

Or, what is the equilibrium that emerges from totally unconstrained mid-decade redistricting? It’s basically that the U.S. House becomes a sort of version of the Electoral College. Whenever a party wins a state trifecta, they rejigger congressional boundaries until they control all or nearly all of the districts in a state.

That bothers me slightly less. The lack of representativeness in the House and the lack of competitive districts are major negatives, but I can imagine this norm changing without really threatening the integrity of the Constitutional system. It at least still has an electoral mechanism, in that you have to win state-level elections to enact your maximalist plan.4 And for better or worse, it’s the equilibrium we’re headed toward anyway until and unless either Congress takes action on gerrymandering or SCOTUS does (and the current SCOTUS isn’t going to). Incidentally, such an equilibrium would not necessarily be bad for Democrats, provided they’re just as aggressive about redistricting as Republicans are, including in their own majority-minority districts.

A “democracy agenda” should be popular

Still, whenever I see a partisan Democrat proposing to fight back by any means necessary — including by doing things like kicking Virginia’s current supreme court out of office — I’m reminded that the parties aren’t in perfectly symmetrical positions.

For one thing, Republicans get to play as the home team because of the current composition of the court. For another, Democrats, especially in their past three presidential campaigns, really emphasized the point that they were the party that stood for norms, institutions and democracy in general. One tactical advantage that Trump has is that he’s so flagrantly hypocritical that nobody expects him to be anything other than self-dealing. Democrats are threading more of a needle.

Do Democrats at least get any political mileage out of their messaging around democracy? Maybe. In 2024, Kamala Harris beat Trump 80-18 among the roughly one-third of the electorate who cited “democracy” as their most important issue. Then again, voters sometimes reason backward on this sort of poll question5 — and Harris lost. Then again, it’s hardly surprising that Trump won given record-setting levels of both immigration and inflation, the whole Biden fiasco, and the generally unpopular position of incumbents around the world — and Trump is now super unpopular.

So here’s a proposed tiebreaker for the edge cases: is your proposed reform popular? Would voters like it?

I’ve written before about some of the undemocratic tendencies of Democrats who wear the “democracy” label on their sleeve. They don’t tend to trust voters much, and they’re more technocrats than populists. By contrast, not only do I think it’s more democratic to actually consider public opinion above and beyond just elections, but I also think that voters will come to better judgments than elites much of the time. I often find myself in a weird part of the Venn diagram as someone who has many technocratic characteristics but is fairly skeptical of central planning and expert judgment.

If you’re going by the polls:

• Any sort of gerrymandering reform would potentially be quite popular;

• Americans favor Puerto Rico but not D.C. statehood;

• And voters are strongly opposed to court packing, but support term limits and/or a mandatory retirement age for Supreme Court justices.

Some of this isn’t going to happen (changes to the tenures of existing justices, unlike court expansion, would require a constitutional amendment). Still, I’d happily take that deal. And it represents a solid foundation for any sort of “democracy agenda” that Democrats might seek to propose in the future — better than presuming the possibility of some sort of total partisan victory in an era of short-lived majorities.

Finally, as promised, here’s the video of my event with Clare and Galen, which was a really fun show. Due to the idiosyncrasies of the Substack publishing system, it’s behind a paywall6, but you can find a free preview of the first 20 minutes over at Galen’s newsletter.

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• I’ll be doing a live show with my former FiveThirtyEight colleagues, Galen Druke and Clare Malone, this Wednesday (5/13) at 6 PM at the Village Underground in NYC! There’s still a little bit of ticket inventory left. I hope to see some of you there.

• And, if you haven’t yet, I’d encourage you to check out PELE, our new international soccer model, which debuted on Friday. We’re always excited to bring you more models, and while yes, there will be a related World Cup version of PELE coming in a few weeks, we think PELE is pretty cool on its own.

Republicans won the redistricting war, after all

As recently as three weeks ago, when Virginia passed a ballot referendum to draw new, more partisan districts, it appeared Democrats had fought the Great Mid-Decade Redistricting War of 2026 to a draw or even gained a slight advantage.

Welp, that is plainly no longer the case. Some further Republican states, like Florida, have redrawn their districts; that part isn’t really a surprise. However, Democrats have also faced a pair of legal setbacks. Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court’s Callais decision weakened the Voting Rights Act. And then on Friday, the Virginia Supreme Court invalidated the ballot referendum on procedural grounds.

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So any victory laps by Democrats were premature. And my thesis that there are no structural impediments to Democrats holding serve with Republicans on redistricting, so long as they were willing to be sufficiently aggressive rather than unilaterally disarm, has been weakened. That thesis gave insufficient consideration to the role of the courts.

At the same time, the impact of the recent decisions is fairly incremental as far as November’s midterms go. Here’s a helpful chart created by the New York Times’s Nate Cohn that summarizes the situation:

According to Cohn’s estimates, the median district had projected to be just 0.1 percentage point more Republican than the country as a whole after the Virginia referendum passed: actually, a tick better for Democrats than the 2024 map. Now, however, the Republican advantage in November looks to be somewhere between 2.5 and 3.9 points, pending further legal action and legislation. (Democrats are appealing the Virginia decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, for what it’s worth, as well as considering what I’d consider to be a fairly radical plan to force state justices into early retirement.)

Now, I do have a couple of technical complexities to add to Cohn’s analysis. One is that it treats the result in each district as deterministic rather than probabilistic. As reliable as the presidential vote tends to be as a predictor of Congressional outcomes in an era of such high partisanship, there will be some unpredictability and regional variation in November.

Ron DeSantis’s new map in Florida, for instance, creates a number of lean Republican and likely-but-not-certain Republican districts that are definitely not safe pickups in the event of a blue wave year or a reversal of the sharp shift toward Republicans in Florida. For that matter, while the Virginia referendum has been portrayed as a 4-seat Democratic pickup, it was probably more like a 2.5- or 3-seat gain on a probabilistic basis. Democrats might still have a shot at adding one or two seats in Virginia.

Also, in 2024, Democrats fared better in the House than the median presidential vote implied. In fact, they almost won the House despite losing the popular vote by 2.6 points in the House and by 1.5 points in the presidency. Several subtle factors contributed to this.1

To sort out the details of all of this, you need a proper probabilistic model, like the Silver Bulletin midterms model we’ll begin publishing soon-ish. (The ETA is roughly 6 weeks out.) It wouldn’t surprise me if it portrays a slightly more optimistic picture for Dems than Cohn’s estimates, but we’ll see.

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The basic equation, though, is that Democrats have gone from a map where if they won the popular vote for the House by any margin at all, they were probably also going to win a majority of districts … to one where they’ll need a little cushion. Currently, they have one. Democrats lead by 6.1 points in our generic congressional ballot tracker.

A 6-point win would very likely be enough for Democrats to claim the House, even if the map winds up at R +3 or R +4. However, a normal-sized polling error in favor of the GOP (if Republicans were to beat their polls by about the same amount that they did in 2024, for instance) would be enough to flip the House back into pure toss-up range. Needless to say, there are also still almost six months until the election, which creates additional uncertainty. (Though that might actually work to the Democrats’ benefit: most congressional ballot polls being published now are conducted among registered voters rather than likely voters, and don’t account for a possible Democratic turnout advantage, for example.)

Overall, the reaction from prediction markets to all of this seems roughly sensible. Polymarket had Democrats’ chances of a House majority peaking at 87 percent a few weeks ago; that’s now down to 78 percent. While I’m not sure I’d call Virginia a “huge blow” to Democrats like some headlines have, the cumulative effect of Virginia + Callais + this latest round of red-state redistricting is material.

Who controls the state courts?

In 2026, Democrats are still favored to take the House, thanks to the blue wind at their backs. But they won’t necessarily have one in 2028. If Gavin Newsom or AOC carries the presidency by a narrow margin in 2028, will they even bring Congress with them? The Senate had appeared to be a bigger barrier to a Democratic trifecta, but now it’s at least theoretically possible that Democrats could control both the presidency and the Senate after 2028 but not the House, depending on the bias of the map two years from now.

The Callais decision will give Republicans some further opportunities to redistrict between 2026 and 2028. But they’re probably closer now to maxing out their maps, especially considering that Democrats may well make state legislative gains this November. In addition to taking another shot at Virginia, Colorado and New York loom large as places where Democrats could draw far more partisan maps before 2028, though New York Democrats have expressed skepticism about a more aggressive redraw.

However, if courts usually rule in the Republicans’ favor, basically letting Republicans get away with everything they want, and Democrats only half of what they want, that could produce a case of one step forward after two steps back.

The Supreme Court, obviously, features a 6-3 conservative majority that usually rules along partisan lines in redistricting decisions. In the past, Democrats probably weren’t strategic enough about pushing their older justices into retirement, but those choices can’t be undone now. (It wouldn’t surprise me to see a revival of talk about court packing.)

Virginia’s court is also Republican-leaning. Three of the seven justices were elected by the state legislature when Republicans controlled both the Virginia House of Delegates and the state senate, compared to just one under a Democratic sweep. (The other three justices were chosen when the state house and senate were split.)

As recently as 2020, state courts tended to lean quite Republican, according to an extensive analysis conducted that year by Ballotpedia. This reflected a combination of several things: a longstanding GOP tendency to place more emphasis on the judiciary, plus a pair of very poor midterms for Democrats in 2010 and 2014, which, when combined with self-perpetuating GOP gerrymanders enacted after the 2010 Census, tended to entrench the GOP advantage in state legislatures.

Unfortunately, the Ballotpedia map hasn’t been updated since then, and because every state uses different procedures to select its justices, properly revising it would require a lot of work.

Clearly, some things have changed since 2020. Democrats flipped Wisconsin in 2023, for example, but have lost control of the court in North Carolina.

The best I can do for today — this was supposed to be a short newsletter — was to ask Google Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT to take deep dives, probe a couple of things that seemed wrong, and have them argue about one another’s borderline calls and edge cases until I developed some sort of consensus ratings. I told the models to focus on de facto behavior, how the courts are behaving recently as a practical matter, which usually but does not always match the pedigree of the people who appointed them. (Massachusetts has a fairly liberal court despite most members being appointed under Republican Charlie Baker, for example.) Here are those ratings:

As measured by electoral votes, the tally is Republicans 264, Democrats 252, tossup 22. So there’s a slight Republican edge there, which expands if you only consider only the Strong Republican (232) and Strong Democrat (205) courts. Among the seven canonical 2024 swing states, Democrats actually have a 4-3 advantage, including all three of the “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. But Republicans make up for that with conservative courts in the borderline swing states of Virginia and New Hampshire.

It’s not enough of an edge, in my view, to call this a structural Republican advantage in the state courts; Democrats have smartly put more emphasis on court seats in recent elections and mostly evened the score. But obviously, the 6-3 conservative advantage on the Supreme Court matters just as much and probably more.

Redistricting 201 considerations and the risk of complacency

The Republican advantage in courts — even if it’s mostly just the Supreme Court and federal courts now rather than state courts — is not a reason for Democrats to disarm. Were it not for California, for example, the 2026 House race would be one step closer to a true toss-up.

But it probably does mean the particular mechanisms Democrats use to engage in partisan redistricting will receive more scrutiny, on average. For the record, I’m not as cynical about the Supreme Court’s decisions as some people with my political orientation. But SCOTUS can certainly sometimes engage in Calvinball-type rationales where the rules are mostly made up as they go along.

Democrats’ gerrymanders tend to look a little bit uglier, for instance, because smaller, blue-leaning urban areas are typically adjoined by spaghetti strings. That arguably shouldn’t matter, since there’s no federal mandate for compactness, though it is enshrined in some state constitutions. But it might matter if SCOTUS’s decisions involve partisan motivated reasoning.

It’s probably important for Democrats to keep public opinion somewhat in mind, too. Polls have shown that partisan gerrymandering is quite unpopular in theory — even if voters have been willing to adopt it in practice. Courts, even the Supreme Court, are somewhat responsive to public opinion. Moreover, there’s the potential for voter backlash to consider. As you can see from Cohn’s chart, the marginal impact of any one state redistricting on the national picture is relatively small. Voters can get really motivated if they feel like they’re being disenfranchised or treated unfairly, however. Turnout was actually stronger in the Republican areas of Virginia for the referendum, for example. Personally, I think that the state legislature there retiring justices early would read as extremely dubious to voters in what’s still a relatively moderate state: probably not enough for Virginia to go back to being a purple state again, but who knows. I’d probably argue for Democrats to turn the dial up to 9 on redistricting, but that would be more like an 11.

However, Democrats can’t really afford to leave seats on the table in states like New York or Colorado, where more partisan maps are very likely to pass muster with state courts. As I wrote last week, the notion that there’s some intrinsic trade-off between minority representation and the number of Democrats elected to Congress is true in red states but is basically a myth in blue states: in fact, smartly-drawn maps could easily increase the number of minority members elected, in part because Democrats elected to Congress are much more likely to belong to minority groups. The real motivation behind Democrats’ reluctance in states like New York and Maryland to redistrict more aggressively is probably incumbents seeking to protect themselves.

And what should probably also worry Democrats is the risk of complacency. In 2022, Democrats had a comparatively good midterm by historical standards, considering President Biden’s unpopularity at the time. But it wasn’t great: they did lose control of the House! It was enough for Democrats to convince themselves that everything was fine with Biden, however. Gavin Newsom gave up his not-very-subtle “invisible primary” campaign to replace Biden on the 2024 ticket soon thereafter.

Look, November will probably go well for Democrats. They remain favored in the House, the Senate is shaping up to be close, and they’ll probably pick up their share of governorships and state legislative seats. But if Democrats only narrowly win the House this November with a D +6 or D +7 popular vote margin, it very much won’t be safe in 2028 when all 435 seats are contested again (some with new lines). The race for the House in presidential years tends to be relatively even.

Because Democratic maps will tend to face more scrutiny given the current courts, that means they’re basically playing as the away team. They probably need to balance considerations like public opinion more carefully than Republicans do. The close calls won’t tend to go in their favor, and they’re going to have their share of disappointments, like in Virginia last week. But their goal should be to fight as close to a draw as they can in the short run, and then put even more of an emphasis on courts and state legislatures in the long run — until and unless both parties agree that the current situation is untenable and undemocratic, and pass a bipartisan bill to fix this.

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 m…

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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.