It’s just past 4 a.m. here on the East Coast, and as I write this, Abdul El-Sayed leads Haley Stevens by only 1.4 points in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate with 95+ percent of the vote counted in Michigan. The margin is narrow, but when there aren’t a lot of votes left, will be hard for Stevens to make up. El-Sayed has been declared the winner by NBC News, and is considered the almost certain victor by prediction markets, but other news outlets haven’t called the race yet. I’ve never been much of an election night modeling guy — my whole thing is pre-election forecasts — so I’m not going to offer an opinion about whether NBC and the prediction markets got ahead of themselves. Most of you will probably read this in the morning, and the results may be clearer by then, but the points I’ll make in this newsletter aren’t particularly contingent on the exact final result.

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However, this is one of those cases where the headline doesn’t tell the whole story. A 1- or 2-point win for El-Sayed would be much narrower than the results predicted by polls; the last seven surveys of the race as tracked by the New York Times had El-Sayed up by margins ranging between 10 and 19 points. I will note that an earlier Glengariff Group poll had Stevens ahead by 7, which is actually likely to end up closer to the end result than most of the other surveys, though it was pretty far off, too.

I’ve been putting the finishing touches on our midterms model, and that’s been going well; it should launch (early) next week. But I wrote some notes to myself while following Michigan in the background over the course of the evening. Considering the hour, I’m mostly just going to reproduce those with some uncharacteristic brevity.

11 quick thoughts on the Michigan result

1. We should start by acknowledging that an El-Sayed win by any margin is a significant accomplishment. It’s not exactly surprising, given the success of more progressive candidates elsewhere and that he’s been ahead in the polls for a couple of months now. But this is a guy whose only previous attempt at elected office resulted in a 22-point loss to Gretchen Whitmer in the 2018 Michigan gubernatorial primary. Michigan, where I’m from, isn’t New York City or some super liberal district in Colorado. This is a big W for progressives in a purple state.

2. With that said, I think AES and some of his supporters are guilty of managing expectations very poorly. Some of the polls I mentioned were from firms affiliated with El-Sayed’s campaign. I don’t understand the utility of publishing internal polls showing yourself ahead by double digits — personally, if I ran a campaign, I’d make it a strict policy to never release internal polls, which are often highly misleading. And if you’re going to do that, you probably ought to come closer than within ~10 points of the actual result. El-Sayed has also predicted a big win for himself against Mike Rogers, who won the Republican nomination uncontested tonight, but who is a relatively moderate Republican for the Trump Era. As someone who can be a little trollish himself, and is sometimes accused of being cocky, I’ve kind of vibed with AES’s confidence on some level, but I’m also not running for office and would be a terrible candidate if I did.1

3. In presidential primaries, results relative to “expectations” matter a great deal. Indeed, you can literally even model this, as we did in 2020. If AES had been going against Stevens in the New Hampshire primary, and had been favored by 13 points in polls but won by 1 or 2 instead, his chances of eventually becoming the Democratic nominee would probably have declined tonight, because the 1 extra delegate he won or whatever would be outweighed by the perceived loss of momentum and the message that donors, the media, etc. took from that. Primaries for Congress don’t work that way: there’s no runoff in this race, no second chance for Stevens next week. Still, this race has big implications for how Democrats will navigate the political landscape going forward, including specifically in 2028. I’ve generally been bullish about the left’s chances in 2028. But the way this went down won’t provide the morale boost that a bigger win might have.

4. Instead, a very narrow AES win is in the sweet spot of the “second-guessing zone” for the Democratic establishment. Instead of accepting that they have a lot of problems, they’re going to ask what they might have done differently. Mallory McMorrow actually got 4 percent of the vote despite dropping out (so El-Sayed isn’t likely to hit 50 percent). What if she had endorsed Stevens? Or what if she had been the nominee? With some very notable exceptions such as Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a lot of the Democratic establishment, including Michigan incumbent Sen. Elissa Slotkin, stayed on the sidelines in the race.2 I don’t necessarily know that their endorsements would have helped Stevens, especially since a lot of El-Sayed’s rhetoric was about how the Democratic establishment, AIPAC and wealthy donors had been putting a heavy finger on the scale.3 But the establishment might regard this as a game in which they took the starters out at halftime, and almost won anyway, rather than one they were destined to lose the whole time.

5. It’s clear that progressives are rising in the Democratic Party overall. But it’s also clear that there’s a fair amount of race-by-race variance. Just tonight, in Missouri’s 1st congressional district, former Squad member Cori Bush lost to a moderate Democrat by 22 points in a comeback bid, while one of the most moderate Democrats in the House, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, easily advanced to the general election in Washington’s 3rd district. Roy Cooper is the Democratic nominee in North Carolina, and that hasn’t been particularly contentious. The media likes simple narratives, and “progressives rising” is by no means wrong, but nobody should be bending the knee at this point.

6. With that said, there’s a fair amount of cope in establishment circles too. Stevens loses? Well, a lot of establishment types will just assert that she was a bad candidate. Andrew Cuomo? Bad candidate. Janet Mills? Bad candidate. These things are rarely so obvious in advance, though. Stevens won election to the House four times in a suburban Detroit district with perfectly normal margins, for instance.

7. Prediction markets have an increasing tendency toward overconfidence. In my chat with Eli on Sunday, I said explicitly that giving Stevens only a ~2 or 3 percent chance was too low, given that polls in Congressional primaries are often wildly off. Historically, in gambling-adjacent activities, there’s a bias toward longshots. But I think that may have flipped in the other direction given all the attention given to prediction markets and that people tend to treat them as oracular when they shouldn’t, perhaps producing some self-reinforcing feedback loops.

8. Just to put a finer point on this, the average error in polls in presidential primaries since 2000 is around 9 points of vote margin (!), more than twice President Trump’s (in)famous polling outperformance in 2016. And polling error tends to increase the further you go down the ballot. So if it’s 9 points in a presidential primary, it might be who-knows-what in a congressional primary, but we’re probably looking at something in the double digits.4 Many people, including traders at prediction markets, tend to be much too crude in the heuristics they apply toward polling error, failing to recognize that polling is relatively accurate in some types of races but routinely quite inaccurate in others and that much of this is predictable.

9. Further, the whole trajectory of polling in this race was weird. At one point, the McMorrow campaign successfully pressured a small news outlet into quashing a poll that showed them way behind. At another point, El-Sayed falsely accused a different pollster that had Stevens narrowly ahead of having been funded by AIPAC. Many of the pollsters in this race have mediocre pollster ratings, aren’t rated at all because they’re new, or aren’t used by Silver Bulletin because they don’t meet our standards for professional polling firms. There can sometimes be cases of the blind leading the blind in polling, producing a lot of herding toward a sometimes very wrong consensus. The constant, frankly often very amateurish “discourse” about polling on Twitter and elsewhere on social media doesn’t help matters either. There are fewer and fewer pollsters I trust to do their own thing, instead of being influenced by “the narrative”.

10. With that said, Congressional primaries are hard to poll, and Michigan is a particularly hard state to poll for various reasons. Among them: a) Stevens’s best groups were probably rural white voters and working-class Black voters, two groups that are notoriously hard to reach in surveys; b) AES was counting on big turnout from younger voters, but they often don’t turn out in big numbers in primaries; c) I think it’s pretty clear that AES had the more enthusiastic supporters, but this is a mixed indicator because of non-response bias: more enthusiastic voters might be more likely to vote, but may also be proportionately even more likely to participate in surveys when what you might call “Shy Stevens” voters don’t; d) Michigan has a reasonably large Arab-American population, but not large enough to yield a reliable crosstab in (say) a 600-person survey, so instead Arab-Americans routinely fall between the cracks in opinion research.

11. Tonight is probably bearish for Democrats in the general election, but I wouldn’t overstate that. I’ve always thought people are too eager to derive implications about general election strength from primary results. Part of the reason that Democratic voters are moving to the left is that moderate voters are leaving the party, and AES will need to win them in the general election. If you’re a Silver Bulletin reader who happens to be a Democrat, one positive would be if El-Sayed takes tonight’s results as a signal that he needs to be more conciliatory between now and November.

Thanks for reading, and look for the model next week.

Next week, we’ll launch our midterms model, with complete forecasts of the 435 U.S. House races, 35 Senate races, and 36 gubernatorial races on the ballot this November, as well as the overall likelihood of each party controlling each chamber and all kinds of other details.1

The model performed quite well in 2018 after the code was basically rewritten from scratch, and again in 2022 after some further tweaks mostly to reflect increasing political polarization. So we’re not looking to reinvent the wheel. However, AI tools are helpful for refining existing code, so we’ve cleaned up some minor inconsistencies, made the code faster, and tested a few hypotheses that should help around the margin.

We feel pretty safe about the timing because we got the model basically fully “working” over the weekend. Still, we need a day or two to make some further coding refinements, a day to write up the documentation, a day or two to test out some further empirical improvements on our punch list, a day or so to finalize the graphics, and some time to double-check everything and kick the tires on anything that looks weird. We’ll also surely have some “take” for you about Michigan after Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens have their primary on Tuesday night. That’s a finite amount of work, but it probably lands us at early next week, not this week, for model launch. We greatly appreciate your patience and are looking forward to having a model-heavy autumn with both the midterms and ELWAY.

Yesterday, I chatted with Eli about the model, the midterms and Michigan — and Trump’s approval rating, which once again recently hit a record low in our tracking. You can find the video below, though it’s choppy in places2 so there’s also a lightly edited transcript below.

Nate Silver: Hey Eli, how are you doing?

Eli McKown-Dawson: Doing pretty well. How about you?

Nate: Good. I’m going to have some news for you and for Silver Bulletin in a minute that explains why I’m sadly kind of bleary-eyed.

The model is working, which is good. That doesn’t mean it’s done, but it means that it takes these files that we — mostly you — spent months gathering. I think there are 68 different input files that we use in the program.3 It goes through 14,000 lines of code, and it spits out coherent projections for the state and the national picture.

There are a lot of things we still have to vet. By the way, you almost gave me a heart attack last night. One of the variables that we use is a candidate experience variable, which runs on a scale of 0 for never elected to anything to 3 for a senator or governor. In the [data] we were using, a candidate with no experience got coded as a 9. Nine is sometimes used for missing data. The model interpreted a 9 as you’re fucking Gandhi crossed with Reagan crossed with Obama crossed with the Pope. You’re the most popular incumbent ever. So it had all these [inexperienced challengers] crushing [incumbents]4, and I’m like, “wow, we’re really out of consensus. That’s interesting.” And then we fixed that, and it became more normal.

I will say, we are going to spend a little bit more time debugging, vetting, building better graphics, and looking at new features. My guess, in true honesty, readers, is that we will launch the model a week from Monday, so the 10th. It’s not official — we’ll talk about it in our planning meeting. If life depended on it, we could probably launch this week. We have a big primary this week in Michigan, which we’re going to talk about a lot. But basically, we are on the final lap, I would say, Eli. On the checkered flag lap.

Eli: I do just want to say, I saw that message yesterday about the nine versus the zero coding. I’m fairly certain your original message about that did say to code those people as nines. So maybe it’s not just me making the nine mistake. But that’s okay.

Nate: It’s a one-line change in the code. I recoded all nines to zeros and all blanks to zeros. But it scared the hell out of me.

We [published] the World Cup model a couple of months ago, and in that model, you have the bare bones of a simplified version that actually kind of works. And then you refine it, and there are more and more steps that you add. Maybe you add secondary data sources or better ways to algorithmically process the data. So you get to see the results refining in real time. Of course, you don’t want to be too results-oriented.

[But] with the midterm model, 80 percent of the work is in gathering these 68 fucking files that we have, and making sure that the 550-odd races5 that we’re forecasting — governor, House, Senate — making sure all that information is accurate, merging candidates’ FEC IDs with their pollster IDs and that kind of stuff. So by the time you actually see what the model says for the first time, you’re 90 percent of the way through the work.

What’s the national environment looking like?

Nate: Do you have any questions about the model? I don’t want to commit to what it says because we haven’t debugged it yet and we haven’t vetted any of the outputs.

Eli: About what it’s saying right now, you mean?

Nate: Yeah. I’ll be vague as needed.

Eli: This is a tough one, but it’s one of the races I’m more curious about. What is Maine looking like? Maine Senate. What does the model think about that?

Nate: It has (Troy) Jackson favored. [But] I’ll put it like this: the notion that Maine and Michigan could be more challenging states for Democrats than you’d expect … [that] doesn’t ruin Democrats’ chances of taking the Senate as much as you’d think. And now I’m really spoiling content that we should be putting behind a paywall.

I think people forget the longer tail of races like Iowa, for example. If you look at Iowa, it is polling as a toss-up, basically. With the fundamentals, my guess is the model will have it as “lean R” — I don’t remember offhand — but Iowa is a big deal. Even a state like Nebraska, potentially, where Dan Osborn is running as kind of a quasi-populist independent and presumably would caucus with Democrats if it came down to that. There’s this longer tail of races that might get a little bit neglected, and it’s a longer and larger playing field than I think people might assume. We’re not going to be too far out of the consensus. There are other models, some of them are good, and they’re kind of mostly pointing in the same direction.

The other thing that I thought was interesting: a lot of [this] will change after Labor Day — but a lot of the generic ballot data, and sometimes the horse race polls, are denominated in registered voter currency. The way our model adjusts for likely voters, it used to be that Republicans reliably had a turnout advantage in midterm elections. Now that’s changing, as Democrats have the higher-turnout, college-educated coalition. We at this point are just starting out with a prior that you have zero conversion from RV to LV. However, we look at polls that survey both, and in those polls, Democrats gain a net of about two-and-a-half points among likely voters versus registered voters. So when you see the generic ballot number, which is D +6.2 or something…

Eli: It’s D +6.5 right now.

Nate: 6.5, right. Some of those are likely voter polls, some of them are registered voter polls. If all of them were likely voter polls, then that probably pushes it up to a +7 or a +8. As we’ve discussed before, if you’re in a +7, +8, +9 environment, that’s when some of these red states that are PVI +11 come into play. They become almost toss-ups. Democrats have also had very good fundraising numbers, for example, even though the DNC is having a great deal of trouble, and even though Elon Musk has pledged to donate X number of millions of dollars to the campaign. But in individual contributions, Democrats use their enthusiasm [edge]. They use tools like ActBlue to really penetrate pretty far down the map. And some of these populist candidates — maybe the model won’t love them, they don’t tend to have a lot of elected experience, and that is a variable that empirically matters — did raise a lot of money, too. So those things are all explaining why the playing field is a little bit broader for Democrats than you might think.

We’re [also] going to look at, for example, whether the generic ballot is more stable now. It used to be that no one was paying attention to Congress until after Labor Day. In recent years, you’ve been locked into the environment a little bit quicker.

One [other] thing we always look at or reevaluate is how correlated different races are. If you think about a presidential map where you have Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on the ballot in every state, it would be impossible to imagine Kamala Harris losing Maine but winning Ohio. In the Senate, you have 35 separate races that all have different candidates. States will have very non-uniform turnout, depending on how much money is spent there and how many races are competitive. Some will have almost a presidential-year turnout. Some will be very light.

And in 2018 and 2022, the midterm results were more regionalized than people expected. I think in both years the first substantive, important state to report its results was Florida. Eli, you’re from Florida. Florida has turned quite red, and so in both those years, the first results for Democrats looked disastrous. It turned out that actually Democrats had a very good midterm in 2018, but they lost the Senate seat in Florida. And they had a fine midterm year relative to expectations in 2022, when an unpopular Biden was president.

You also had some regionalization here in the New York-New Jersey area in 2022. We had a little micro Republican red wave that didn’t show up anywhere else in the country. We kind of made our bread and butter on models that understand properly the correlation between different races. That, in some ways, was the big Silver Bulletin slash FiveThirtyEight innovation. But people overadjust. It’s not as correlated in midterm years as it is for the presidency itself. And furthermore, the correlation between presidential races and midterms is a little bit lower when you don’t have an actual president on the ballot, and instead you just have an expectation based on previous voting patterns.

We’re also going to make the model faster. These AI tools are both incredible and at times incredibly frustrating, but usually they can find improvements that just make the code run faster and more efficiently. Eli, what do you want to talk about? Do you want to go down to Michigan?

Eli: I think Michigan. We kind of hit on that a little bit already, talking about the Senate and the model and what it’s thinking. One thing to add before we do, though, just on the registered voter/likely voter split: I looked at this last week. Right now, in the recent generic ballot polls, still something like 60 percent of them are among registered voters. So over the next couple of months we probably will start to see more of that shift, because right now most people really are still polling registered voters. We’ve not hit the point where that shift is happening yet.

Nate: Which is reasonable, right? People don’t necessarily know if they’re going to vote right now, and to some extent we want surveys of public opinion based on the broader population. But yes, that’s about a two, two-and-a-half point gap. It can sometimes be even more in individual states [than] on the generic ballot.

The generic ballot is a very weird, abstract question that behaves differently from other polling series. You wrote about this6, and we’ll repurpose that piece as a Model Talk at some point. But other people’s generic ballots are too bouncy. For whatever reason, empirically, there’s not as much herding on the generic ballot as on other polls. Meaning, in this Michigan race, every single pollster is El-Sayed +12 in the primary.7 That’s a little herding-ish. On the generic ballot you don’t have that as much. There are very strong house effects, as we call them. Different pollsters have different views. They don’t seem to be anchored to anything quite as much. What that means is that you have to be more patient and wait for more data to have a reliable average. And people who haven’t looked at that empirically wind up with polling averages that bounce around too much.

There are mathematical ways to test this. You don’t want it to be autocorrelated. This is getting more technical than I thought for a Sunday morning quote-unquote brunch chat. But if [your average] goes from D +5 to D +6, the predicted reading for tomorrow should not be D +5 or D +7. If you’re efficiently accounting for [all] information, then you set things such that it moves in the way that best predicts next week’s value on the generic ballot.8 And you need to use fairly sluggish settings on the generic ballot as compared with presidential approval, where you have a higher density of polls and maybe more consistency in how pollsters ask those questions and how people interpret them.

Eli: We saw this a little bit over the past month or so. In our average, the generic ballot peaked at around D +7, and then it reverted about a point to D +6. Other averages that weren’t doing quite as much smoothing as us had maybe a three-ish point drop, which was way too much. Because even with the usual variation — just last week there were a lot of incredible polls for Democrats coming out, D +7, D +10 — you still do have people showing it at D +4. Some pollsters are just very, very consistent, showing the generic ballot not moving at all. And when you get these periods where that’s all that’s coming out, you don’t want your average to over-index on those polls and revert too much to the D +4 area, which is definitely too low for what the environment actually is.

Nate: And look, we also have some precedent based on history. If you are looking at what presidential approval is … and you account for the fact that we do have greater polarization now … you’d probably expect Democrats to be +7 or +8. That’s [also] a familiar number if you’ve seen recent, non-2022 midterms.9 Why 2022 was only a relative ripple for Republicans is an interesting question. It may reflect the Democratic turnout enthusiasm advantage. It may reflect the shadow of Trump being unpopular. It reflects candidate recruitment in some cases.

But people don’t change their minds about this abstract question of which party you would vote for for Congress as often as they do about Trump. Let’s say you’re a cross-pressured voter, so there are some things you like about Trump. Maybe you like him on the economy, and maybe you think it’s cool how he got our player unsuspended from a red card in the World Cup. But then the war with Iran starts up again, and you hear [about] that, and you see some YouTube video, and you’re like, “oh yeah, that kind of sucks.” You change your mind more [often]. Or if you’re [a voter] in the Stevens-El-Sayed race. That race has now stabilized, but you’re picking up lots of advertising, lots of information about the candidates. But party [affiliation] is much more glacial. It gets locked in pretty early, and I think we’re seeing the effect tangibly.

Trump’s approval, if anything, has tanked even further [though].

How low can Trump’s approval rating go?

Eli: Today, his net approval is -20.6, which is an all-time low, both first and second term. At least in our retrospective averages, that’s the new low.

Nate: And this has been kind of the pattern. I think we were early, Eli, about telling people that the floor on second terms is a lot lower. Bush became profoundly unpopular in his second term, for example. There’s no need to rehabilitate the candidate Weekend at Bernie’s style for re-election. Then people are aspiring for how they’re going to position themselves for 2028, potentially. People are like, “well, at some point you’re going to run out of repercussions here if I defy you.” And [other Republican candidates] are concerned about their own races in D +8, D +10 type environments.

Eli updates the approval ratings every day, sometimes twice a day, three times a day. Has anything surprised you about this? Or what patterns have you learned from studying this obsessively for a couple of years?

Eli: I do think it’s been interesting to look at these numbers in relation to the Iran War, because there really has been some movement based on what’s going on with that, and especially how it’s related to things like gas prices. We had this period a little while ago where there was a stretch of ceasefire-ish type stuff as negotiations were going on. Gas prices went down, and that was a period for a few weeks where Trump’s approval rating was actually ticking up — both in our average, and even if you looked at the same pollsters who poll every week or every month, you saw his numbers improving a little bit across the board. Now things have heated back up, gas prices are back up, and you’re really seeing now just a string of awful polls for him.

That and tariffs. People really do not like tariffs. Liberation Day was the first big drop we had in the average, very early on, and tariffs are also now popping back up. It’s been interesting to see how those two things — people don’t like them, and when they are salient, and when they start affecting gas prices or other prices, it does seem to really impact the approval ratings.

Nate: Gas prices are canonically an extremely visible artifact. Usually, you go into a foreign country in the Middle East, and you start a war, and things deteriorate gradually. Unless people have families in the military, or are defense contractors, [they] might not be following the conflict from day to day that much. Here, there’s a fucking buzzer, where anytime it looks like this ceasefire — or the Schrödinger ceasefire — is breaking down, then it’s reflected immediately in how much oil is going for, and within a few days you have producers trying to anticipate the effect on future gas prices and changing their prices in that way. So it’s a very, very quick feedback loop. Sometimes the stock market is a little bit of a feedback mechanism too. There is concern about the “is AI a bubble” story, along with Iran as this perpetual concern, and then [interest] rates.

I kind of annoyed some resistance-y Bluesky types a couple of weeks ago by saying that [some of the recent stories] about Trump are kind of boring and stupid. I think I was triggered by the second iteration of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner … he was insulting to some journalists in ways that were inadvisable. People [were] like, “oh my God, this is the worst thing to ever happen.” It’s like, it’s the worst thing to happen since two days ago or something. But the public actually does not follow politics in the way that people like us do — who are blogging about it every day, or doing Substack Lives every day.

Eli: No.

Nate: The public cares about big, substantive stuff. They care about economic anxiety. They care about Iran. Even the Epstein stuff — maybe it hurt Trump a little bit, but there’s not a clear line that you can draw. So tariffs and Iran are the kind of public triggers. Maybe ICE a little bit. He seemed to suffer a little bit when we had two people killed by ICE back in the winter. It’s actually fairly predictable.

Eli: That’s interesting too, because Trump’s immigration approval rating is also right around his second-term low again, at about net -13, which is where it was earlier with the two ICE shootings. So that’s also been on a bit of a downturn, even though it hasn’t been in the news as much.

Nate: But not as much as the tariffs number and the affordability-slash-inflation number. Those ones bounce around more. I think if you asked the White House, they’d say, “Well, sure, people aren’t happy about the economy, it’s not fantastic, but we can kind of win them back with cultural grievance type issues.” And it’s kind of almost the reverse, if anything. It’s like, “you know what? You’re full of shit about the ceasefire, it keeps breaking down. You’re full of shit about tariffs lowering prices. So maybe you’re full of shit about ICE too.” That’s kind of more how it works. It’s a negative halo effect, as opposed to being a distraction.

Eli, how low do you think Trump could get? What’s your 20th percentile estimate of approval as of, let’s say, February 2027 — half a year from now?

Eli: Right now, we’re pretty close to breaking 60 percent on the share of people who disapprove of Trump. I think I’d have to look a little bit at some of the other historical numbers. I think it’s possible that it gets a fair bit lower. It depends on what happens with Iran and that sort of thing. It feels like it could hit -30 at some point. That would be a very low [number]. But I think if things like gas prices do not improve, if the war in Iran becomes a more widespread conflict, I think that could start to cause bigger problems. And maybe even post-midterms, when Trump is even more of a lame duck, he could start to lose even more sway with the party, because then things really are going to kind of switch over more to 2028. What is your low estimate here? Do you have one?

Nate: By the way, to satisfy the many readers who understood that Biden’s age was a big problem: Trump turned 80, was it a month or so ago10? He’s also losing his fastball, if he ever had a fastball, a little bit more. But … if you look at actuarial curves, there’s an inflection point around 80 — he has the hardest job in the world, [so] give him that much credit — [but] that could lead to more poor decision-making.

What’s the chance of Trump on some day in the next six months achieving a -30 net [approval rating]? I think the chances might be 25 percent or something. It’s not too crazy.

[And] if you look at his strong approval numbers, only 20.8 percent of people have a strongly approving view of him. People fuck that up. They think, well, he might only have — what’s his overall approval number?

Eli: It’s 36 or 35 percent.

Nate: People say “he might only have 35 percent, but they’re the most dedicated 35 percent.” And that’s not true. If anything, the disapprovals are stronger: 47.6 percent of people have a strongly disapproving view of Trump. So if you look at that spread, it’s already a -27, and so far that has been a leading indicator for how other people feel. There is some floor. [For] the net approval [to go] below -30 — or the gross approval below 30 percent — that seems harder. But who knows?

Eli: You do have, in those 20-ish percent of people who strongly approve, some of them are going to stick with him no matter what happens. I’m not sure how much lower that strong approval is going to go. But maybe we’ll break 50 percent strongly disapprove at some point. That seems more possible.

Nate: That would be noteworthy. There can be a permission structure too. These [soft Trump disapprovers] are not people who are going to vote for Pete Buttigieg or AOC in 2028. A lot of them are people who would probably even vote for Trump again if they absolutely had to. But — and to get [back to] the midterm model — you’re seeing this differential in fundraising, you’re seeing this differential in voter enthusiasm as measured by likely voter versus registered voter polls. And people might just be like, “you know what, I’m just not going to turn out for this midterm.”

Turnout was very high in 2018, and pretty high in 2022. One irony: there are polls where you ask how enthusiastic voters are — our model actually calculates a turnout number; we’re gathering that data. Democrats might not mind one-sided turnout in 2026. Trump has never been a particularly helpful president as far as helping [other Republican] candidates. And in a midterm, (a) he might endorse candidates who are not particularly winners, and (b) he’s not the most enthusiastic campaigner, and so forth. Are they having that stupid fucking convention?

Eli: Yes. It’s in Texas. It’s going to be in Dallas.

Nate: I thought it was somewhere fun. Nothing wrong with Dallas. Maybe we go or something. Dallas in September, see the Cowboys, maybe. [Thinks.] There’s zero chance we’re going to go to that, or even spend more than two seconds watching a YouTube clip. I don’t like conventions. I don’t like the State of the Union. I like debates, man. Debates are fucking awesome.

Eli: I do like debates.

Nate: But I don’t like the constructed stuff in politics so much. It’s stagecraft.

Eli: Often it’s just a show, and there are formalities that go on, but it’s nothing particularly newsworthy — unless you’re one of the people who goes through everything Trump says line by line and clips it for X.

Republicans need at least 2 big things to go right to hold the House

Nate: So, prediction markets — I’m not going to reveal our [model’s take] yet — give Democrats around an 80 percent chance of winning the House and a 50 percent chance of winning the Senate. Maybe it’s up to 82 or 83 for the House, I forget.

Eli, describe to me the world where that 20 percent [chance of a Republican House] happens.

Eli: Oh man, okay. I think it’s either a world where there’s a huge reversion in the generic ballot national environment, or the polls are just wrong in some big way and we’re heading for another year where we’re really underestimating Republicans. I think it would have to be a world where Trump gets a little less unpopular over the next few months. Gas prices go down. Maybe the war in Iran ends and it goes very well, and gas prices go way down. And he’s like, “oh, you know what, tariffs are canceled, we don’t like tariffs anymore.”

I think there would have to be a lot of things that go either right for Republicans or wrong for Democrats for that to happen. Right now, if the polls are at all accurate, the national environment is just too blue for Democrats to lose the House realistically, because there just aren’t that many competitive districts. You’d really have to see a big change in what the national environment looks like — maybe people get really unhappy with Democrats for some reason. Because really, if we’re in not a D +6 or 7 environment but a D +3 environment, Democrats can lose the House, because [the map] sort of favors Republicans. They narrowly won the redistricting wars, at least for this cycle. And so if we’re off in that direction, it’s possible. But based on other indicators like gas prices, like Trump’s approval rating, you’d have to have a lot of things that are all pointing in one direction be off. It’s a 20 percent chance, but I don’t know.

Nate: I don’t know. Sometimes there are, from a meta-forecasting question, the 20 percent chances that you [can] see [happening], and then there are some that you don’t. You know what I mean? We don’t really use our gut per se in the model, that’s why you have a model. Sometimes I’ll have a gut instinct: “well, if I were to bet on this, I’d bet one side or the other.” I don’t think I’d bet the 20 percent side, really.

The [other] thing we are looking at, that I talked about before, is: has the political environment become more stable from the summer through November, as a result of greater polarization locking things in earlier?

Everyone has a way to convert the generic ballot plus other inputs into individual race forecasts, and they seem to show that somewhere around a D +3 is the break-even point, where if Democrats win the popular vote for the House by [only] three, they could lose the House. By the way, there are lots of complications. Democrats have nominated candidates, I think, in all but three House races. This is usually a good sign. They’re not going to win in these deep red states in Alabama, but it’s usually a good sign of a healthy party. Republicans have more blank districts.

But anyway, I think you need maybe two or three ingredients. One of them is a big systematic polling error of the sort that we haven’t had in a midterm recently, but we have in some of the recent presidential years.

Eli: Yeah.

Nate: Two is bullish, consumer-facing economic signs in the … third quarter. That certainly requires some de-escalation in Iran. It requires that you don’t have an AI bubble popping, or other kinds of trauma to the economy in different ways. But if gas prices were declining, we’ve seen tangible impacts already on [Trump’s] polling going from bad to catastrophic [when gas prices increase].

And the third theme, that I’m sure we’ll be discussing a lot for the rest of the year, is: are Democrats leaning too far left? There’s the micro and the macro. In individual races, are Democrats nominating candidates who — if you believe in the median voter theorem — are suboptimally far away from the median voter? And can Trump turn that into a national storyline, that the Democrats are crazy and woke is back? Can they nationalize that story beyond individual races? Because Democrats are nominating [moderate] Roy Cooper in North Carolina, for example. Talarico has a pretty progressive record, frankly, but has been kind of quietly running to the center in that race in Texas. But the DSA-type candidates tend to be more unapologetically proud of being on the left, and don’t necessarily seem to be team players in quite the same way.

So can you have two out of the three: the economy magically recovers, a polling error, or Dems in disarray slash the median voter theorem is still powerful, and [Republicans] win the meta-argument over “are [Democrats] too far to the left?” Two of those three would make the race competitive. And three of them probably means a Republican hold.

Eli: And I think it’s also difficult because — it’s a small sample size, obviously — but usually the out party will gain a few points on the generic ballot between now and the midterms, historically, if you look back at our averages. Obviously, there have been some exceptions, like after 9/11, that was an exception where the out party didn’t gain. But otherwise, it’s another sign in Democrats’ favor.

Nate: Trump’s approval is at -21, rounding off. The generic ballot is at -6 for Republicans, or -7. There is a universe of people who are open to “orange man bad” arguments, and a lot of them will vote for their local Republican member of Congress. But you know what’s going to happen, Eli? A lot of them aren’t going to vote. They’re like, “I’m a Republican who is sick and tired of tariffs and Iran, and if you ask me at this point, I’d say I disapprove of Trump. Maybe I’m excited about 2028 or something. I’m just not going to vote. I’m going to go to the gym or something instead of taking the time to vote, or watch TV.”

The Michigan Senate primary is far from a toss-up

Nate: Eli, we have not talked about Michigan. We should do Michigan before we wrap up.

Eli: Yeah.

Nate: Who’s going to win the primary on Tuesday?

Eli: When it went from a three-person race to a two-person race, you had two polls come out that were conducted right after Mallory McMorrow dropped out, where Stevens was leading by a couple of points. Since that point, though, every poll has shown El-Sayed +10 to +15. It’s been really consistent. Now, a lot of those have been polls from relatively favorable sources — they were conducted by some pro El-Sayed PACs — but you also have nonpartisan polls showing basically the same result.

You have potential for large polling errors in primary polls, and that is a thing that could happen. But that’s also a fairly robust lead. And I think even if you were looking at the older polls before it became a two-person race, that’s not too surprising. I wrote about this a few weeks ago: Stevens would have had to win 80-plus percent of the former McMorrow voters to actually pull even with El-Sayed, who was already leading in that three-person race. So I think El-Sayed is in a very good position to win this primary, unless again there’s some massive polling error such that all the pollsters — even the usually good-track-record Michigan-specific pollsters — are very wrong about what this electorate is going to look like. Plus the DSA left — I know El-Sayed doesn’t call himself a democratic socialist, but he’s very much backed by those same people — they have been doing incredibly well in Democratic primaries this whole cycle. So that’s another point in his favor.

Nate: And they’re organized. They turn people out, including in places where turnout tends to be low.

The sequence, as you mentioned, is a little weird, in that a month ago El-Sayed’s leading in all the polls by 10 or 12 points on average. And then a bunch of stuff happens. There’s this Graham Platner fiasco. McMorrow drops out. Stevens starts to get more media attention. I’m from Michigan, and I might say Haley Stevens possesses one of the more exaggerated versions of Michigan mannerisms. It’s not how the median Michigander talks. It’s not even how the 90th percentile talks.

But anyway, you have these polls. It was El-Sayed +10 or whatever. Then stuff happens. The next two polls actually show Stevens winning by some margin. You can look at our article in real time. We do not say, “oh, now she’s the favorite.” We say, “oh, it’s probably tightening.” Then there are some El-Sayed internal polls that show, no, they’re like, fuck you, we’re still winning by 13 points. And then nonpartisan polls show the same thing. Everyone kind of has the same number: El-Sayed +10, 12, 13, 14, 15, or whatever else.

By the way, when there’s consensus, I don’t regard that as a good sign in polling. I think Michigan polling can be a little bit of the blind leading the blind. It’s one of those upper Midwestern states where there have been problems in recent years. And this is a race where you have big splits between Black voters and white voters. What happens to Arab, Palestinian, Middle Eastern voters in these polls depends on the pollster. They can get clustered into some cross-tab, when you probably want to survey them individually. The voting patterns can be very different.

But yeah, look, I’ll put it like this: if you’ve been kind enough to listen to 45 minutes of this Eli-Nate live stream, here’s some gambling-adjacent advice. Stevens was, when I checked last night, at 3 percent on Polymarket and Kalshi. You’re going to lose this bet almost always. But 3 percent probably has to be too low.11 If you look at — I think people aren’t adjusting for how error-prone polling is in primaries. If this was a general election, 3 percent would be the correct number, or maybe even a little too high.

Eli: Yes.

Nate: All the disastrous polling that we had in 2016 — the biggest errors were off by a net of four, four and a half points. Well, El-Sayed leads by 11 points in the polling average, so it’d be two and a half times that. [But] there are just much wider margins of error in congressional primaries. El-Sayed is counting on getting younger people out to vote who may not vote in primaries ordinarily — though Michigan has a fairly high-turnout state. And you have had a relatively large amount of news.

The thing I totally omitted: at some point after those polls came out — the first couple showing Stevens actually leading, and then the El-Sayed internals — Gretchen Whitmer, who is still quite popular, endorsed Stevens. If we had done this [chat] a week ago, we’d say, “okay, well, look, all of the polling evidence probably favors El-Sayed, but it’s uncertain, and you have this endorsement.” I would have been surprised that that endorsement didn’t apparently move the numbers more. Are you surprised by that? Our timing is good — we [would have looked] like idiots for saying, “oh now, it’s a toss-up,” which it probably [wasn’t]. But I thought that [endorsement would have] moved things a little bit more.

Eli: I kind of did too. [Stevens has] done well on the Michigan endorsement front, because of course the current holder of that seat [Gary Peters] also endorsed her — that happened a few weeks earlier — but that plus Whitmer, I thought that might have moved the needle a little bit. But so far, at least based on the polling, it hasn’t much. I don’t necessarily know what Gretchen Whitmer’s strategy is here, because it’s going to look very bad for her if she’s done this last-minute endorsement and then it doesn’t work. I’m not sure what the calculus there is. But I think we do look better doing this now [instead of a week ago], because we’re not saying, “oh, it’s a toss-up because of the endorsement.”

And yes, I think three to four percent is too low. Again, if this was a general election, that would make more sense. But people do forget how error-prone primary polling actually is. But again, that still doesn’t change the fact that El-Sayed is absolutely the favorite.

Oh, okay. Well, it looks like Nate has left the stream. I know he’s been having some internet issues, so I guess we’re going to wait and see if Nate hops back on.

Nate: Now I’m on my phone. For some reason, the technology stack here at Silver Bulletin headquarters is not as robust as one might hope.

Will El-Sayed win the general?

Eli: I was just talking about Michigan more. We got a question about what this is going to look like in November if El-Sayed does win.

Nate: Let me put it like this: it’s a race that would have to be monitored carefully [for November], as opposed to one that you would assume would be a Democratic pickup with a more conventional candidate in a D +8 environment.

Eli: Yeah.

Nate: Now, with that said, there have been a couple of polls for El-Sayed lately against Mike Rogers that have been quite bad.

Eli: Yeah, he’s been behind in those, while Stevens, who’s also been tested, has been leading. And you know, that’s not a great place to be in Michigan when you have other candidates in redder states who are winning their polls. Democrats like Talarico have been doing well, and Peltola in Alaska, obviously.

Nate: Yeah, if Talarico were to win and El-Sayed were to lose… But I do want to say one thing. At this point in time, when you are at the end of a long, contentious primary, your general election polls tend to suffer. Because maybe Stevens voters, or vice versa, are like, “El-Sayed? Fuck that. They’ve been beating up my candidate, and I’ll vote for Mike Rogers, just watch me.” [But] whoever wins on Tuesday, Democrats will have three months to persuade voters to come back into the fold and not do that. And that’s a pretty important mechanism that usually works for parties.

But still, it would not be ridiculous to see Democrats lose that race with El-Sayed. And the way I look at it, it’s data. We have had this abstract debate for years about how much, if at all, does moderation help. The answer is it actually helps quite a bit, if you’re trying to actually look at empirical historical data. But now we won’t need to have hypothetical data, or data inferred from House races people don’t pay attention to, because you’re going to have cases like the Senate race in Michigan, cases like the gubernatorial race most likely in Wisconsin, where you have explicitly progressive candidates.

Although we will say, El-Sayed has advocated for Medicare for All, but he’s not a member of the DSA. He calls himself a capitalist. He says, I’m a capitalist, and I understand the flaws of capitalism as a capitalist. So he has interesting messaging that’s not quite as boilerplate. It’s sometimes just more interesting than Graham Platner. Graham Platner was a kind of Reddit DSA candidate. And El-Sayed is an interesting candidate, a former podcaster running for office.

Eli, there’s hope for all of us. If the podcaster can become a U.S. senator, then it can happen for anyone.

Eli: I think the other point goes back to what we were talking about a little while ago with the general environment for Democrats. These candidates could end up underperforming by a large amount and still win. Right now, on our generic ballot tracker, we have state-level projections based on the current generic ballot. For Michigan, right now, it’s D +6.5. So El-Sayed could win the primary, underperform by five points, and still potentially win the Senate race. And you could end up seeing that in other places too, like Wisconsin. If you have a very, very good environment for Democrats in November, bad candidates can still win these elections. I’m not sure that’s going to do wonders for the factional fights in the Democratic Party.

Nate: I do want to distinguish governor races from Senate races, because if you are voting for a national body, then people are more partisan, and rationally so. You might say, well — and this was kind of the argument the Platner bros were making toward the end of the race — this is really awful, but the alternative is Donald Trump controls the Senate still.

That logic isn’t as persuasive for a gubernatorial race [which has fewer national implications]. It’s like, “well, fuck you, you nominated that candidate. Nominate a non-DSA candidate next time.” And so I would differentiate that, and our model will too. It will weigh partisanship less in governor races than in Senate races.

But one thing that helps the narrative for progressives — I know it sounds dumb, what about the substance, who cares about the narrative? Well, the narrative matters for how Democrats behave in the future. If El-Sayed wins by three in a D +8 environment, all the smart-alecky people will be like, “well, according to WAR, he was fine, but he was below replacement.” And that won’t persuade people. People just talk about W’s and L’s. They aren’t looking at margin of victory very much. It’s ironically the same type of thing that you wind up looking at in sports betting a lot. It’s very hard, if you lose a football game or a soccer game or a basketball game, for people to say, “oh, it was relatively good relative to expectations.” It’s a very nerdy Eli-and-Nate way of thinking that won’t carry the day in a Democratic primary.

But to be fair, what if El-Sayed wins by 10 points? You’d have to give credit to that, and you have to update your views based on the evidence. There are some reasons to think that everything apart from partisanship is becoming less important, so there might be less of a penalty for nominating a quote-unquote far-left or far-right candidate.

Things are also overdetermined. We do not, I believe, currently have any Arab Americans in the U.S. Senate. Michigan has the largest Arab American population — proportionally, I think.

Eli: Yeah, per capita.

Nate: But that kind of thing can matter. If you look at Dearborn, Michigan, the most Arab American city in the country — what did Harris get, 42 percent of the vote12? And Jill Stein got a bunch of votes.

Eli: Jill Stein got a lot of the vote in those areas in 2024.

Nate: And midterms are kind of low turnout. Maybe El-Sayed sparks more turnout among young voters. Again, that’s not the way I’d bet — I’d bet on him underperforming — but we have to always be open to evidence. Politics is changing in certain ways, and progressives are benefiting from that.

Do you think Stevens and El-Sayed are quote-unquote bad candidates or do you think they’re quote-unquote good candidates?

Eli: If you look at Stevens historically, she’s a meh candidate. She’s fine. Her Split Ticket WAR is around R +1 to D +1 across her various cycles. So she’s just, at least in her House races, been very much a neutral-ish type of candidate, which I guess is what I’d expect if she won and was in the general this year. Which again, in a year that’s going to be good for Democrats, neutral-ish I think is great. I think you’d win with neutral-ish.

El-Sayed, it’s hard to tell. If I had to bet, I think he would underperform a little bit, at least based on these initial polls. Maybe he won’t. Maybe the sort of energy that’s going through all these Democratic primaries right now, where these kinds of candidates are doing very well, maybe that really will carry over into the general, and all these young people are really going to be energized and turn out, and he’s going to overperform. But if I had to put money on it, I would imagine he would underperform at least a little bit, because Mike Rogers will be a decent candidate.

Nate: [Rogers] is as close to a normie, old-era Republican as you can get. Absolutely.

Eli: This isn’t a Texas situation, where the Republican candidate is a mess and you get the benefit of a bad opponent.

Nate: That’s right. I could go on a long thing about why I think Talarico isn’t as fantastic a candidate as the amount of donations he’s getting would seem to suggest. But he’s running against a kind of objectively terrible and scandal-plagued candidate, and that helps a lot. And by the way, his polling has been pretty good.

Eli: It has been pretty good. I see so many Talarico donation ads pop up on YouTube, always asking me for money.

Nate: I never want to be too prescriptive with our readers, and I don’t like giving any type of partisan recommendation on where to spend money. But I will say this, because I’ve said it before: you probably don’t want to donate to the high-profile race that you’re hearing the most about. Those candidates have more fucking money than they’re ever going to need for anything useful. So whether you’re a Democrat, Republican, independent, whatever else, think about your ROI in terms of, does this candidate actually need more marginal resources, or are you getting really heavily diminishing marginal returns?

Eli: And Talarico has a lot of money. As someone who has been spending a lot of time recently digging through FEC filings for the model — he has a lot of money.

Nate: Anything surprising in the fundraising data, Eli? Or is it pretty consistently better for Democrats than Republicans?

Eli: Yeah, Democrats do really well with this. For context, for the listeners, our model is using individual contributions here, as opposed to money from PACs or self-funding. And I think the Democrats are doing really, really well on that front. Honestly, as long as I’ve been paying attention to things, it’s been very consistent, and that’s definitely continuing. Whereas on the Republican side, lots of self-funders like Ramaswamy.

Nate: And we don’t count that, because we aren’t using fundraising as a sign of resources so much as a measure of voter enthusiasm and organizational strength.

In fact, we actually weight contributions from within your state five times more heavily than contributions from out of state, because that indicates local support. We actually refined this process [this year] — it was originally implemented in 2022, but let’s be honest, there were a couple of things that were not as smooth as they could have been about that implementation.13

And it is true, you have this Jaime Harrison race in South Carolina a couple of years ago for Democrats, where he was probably not going to beat Lindsey Graham, and wound up losing by 10. And there was a lot of money that went into this probably pipe dream of a race. Of course, you don’t know what’s a pipe dream ahead of time. It could be that Iowa or Alaska is kind of a white whale race for Democrats this year, potentially.

But Democrats, they like donating. They like smashing that button and donating money to their candidates, and that’s shown up more and more in the data. And Trump, by the way, because he’s kind of self-funded slash funded in mildly corrupt — sometimes more than mildly — quid-pro-quo ways, he’s probably not terrific for the more traditional small- to medium-sized donor Republican fundraising channel. Whereas Democrats like donating to campaigns.

Eli: Yes, absolutely.

Nate: Eli, what else have we got? What else is on your mind? What else are you looking forward to debating, or not debating, about the midterms?

Eli: It’s been so much candidate quality stuff lately with all the Democratic primaries. Genuinely, for my own curiosity, I kind of do hope El-Sayed wins, because I want to see what that kind of general election campaign looks like. Because again, the Democratic candidates of this DSA-adjacent wing have been doing very, very well, but a lot of that wing’s early wins have been in very blue districts or blue areas, like New York City with Mamdani, for example.

I’m very interested to see what a general election campaign from that style of candidate looks like in a competitive state, because so often you end up having these candidates win Democratic primaries in places where the Democratic primary basically is the race, and the general is more or less a formality because the Democrat is almost certainly going to win. So I think that’s why you often see that wing very focused on beating Democrats in primaries. And so I’m interested to see how a general election in a purple state in a neutral year would actually look.

Nate: And [El-Sayed] is not scandal-plagued in the way that Graham Platner is.

Eli: No, so it’s a cleaner test. He was a Rhodes scholar. He’s a doctor. So if he does poorly, it’s not going to be because of scandals.

Nate: Personality is a different category, and he was literally a former lax bro. He’s got a more aggressive personality that people might find either fun and charming or off-putting. I’ll be interested to see the gender splits in this race a little bit, whether he’s getting younger men as much. But it’s a pretty fucking clean test of how much ideology matters in a race like this.

And I will say, for all the WAR-type data, when nerds gather data on underperformance or overperformance in Congress, all of that is from fairly low-stakes races, where they’re not competitive. It’s like, “oh, you’re supposed to win your blue district by 40 points instead of 32. There’s support for moderation.” But this is a clean test. I’ll put it like this: if he were to lose the race — especially if Democrats have a good night overall, or if they don’t, I think either way — if [El-Sayed] loses, then you’ll hear about that race until the end of time from the moderates. If he wins by anything more than a nail-biter, then probably the opposite.

Eli: You’d hear a lot about him from progressives. And maybe he’ll run for president.

Nate: Unlike Zohran, he’s from the United States. That’s not meant to insult Zohran, but you have to be born in the United States to be eligible to be president. And he’s young — I guess he’s 35, right?

Eli: Yeah, he must be at least 35.14

Nate: It is interesting. It’s kind of a selection effect thing. A lot of those progressive candidates are quite charismatic, at least the ones that win their primaries. You don’t have to like Abdul, but it’s a brand of charisma. A certain kind of … charisma, in the way that Haley Stevens has both charisma and anti-charisma in a very strange kind of way.

But there is something to the fact that the archetypal left-wing candidate everyone knows is Bernie Sanders. I think you could call Bernie frumpy. I don’t think Bernie would even mind being called frumpy. Most of these candidates — I mean, Zohran is wearing the suit. El-Sayed is clean-cut. AOC. All these people are pretty good-looking, well-presented people. That’s not a total coincidence. Politics is part symbolism, and it’s part saying, “okay, I’m going to play the part of the more normie role in society.” But that’s going to be an interesting contrast, I’d say.

And it is important too — I know I’m repeating myself — that you have a relatively normal Republican. There are other states where they would nominate Mike the fucking pillow guy Lindell, or whatever … but this is a state where you have one of the more traditional, OG Republicans.

Eli: And that does matter, because otherwise it’s not a good test at all, because you can’t tell what’s going on, whether it’s a bad Democratic candidate or a bad Republican candidate causing problems. And I do think the results of these sorts of races are going to matter for Democrats going forward, in terms of when they’re thinking about 2028, who to nominate, that sort of thing. If progressives do very well in the midterms, that wing of the party is going to use it as evidence that their brand is going to be a winning way going forward — maybe nominating AOC.

Nate: Yeah, look, the thing we haven’t mentioned — we haven’t mentioned Israel and Gaza and AIPAC very much. The second biggest theme after Medicare for All has been AIPAC, AIPAC, AIPAC. Maybe the biggest theme, frankly, coming from El-Sayed.

Eli: I saw some interesting data, I think from The Argument, a couple of weeks ago. They were looking at how often candidates are mentioning Israel or AIPAC in their emails, and I think El-Sayed was maybe the second or third most frequent mentioner of those topics in his fundraising emails.

Nate: And of course, AIPAC is complicated, because it can be kind of this motte-and-bailey thing, where on the one hand it can be a question about Israel, obviously, and a proxy for Israel policy. On the other hand, it can be this question about corporate, national donors. And look, I don’t think it would be the worst thing if there were more of a stigma for candidates who raise money from big PACs and corporations. Maybe it’s time to have that conversation.

Obviously, Israel is very divisive. Maybe it won’t be so divisive [for Democrats in the future] though. Maybe people will just think, well, if you’re a Democrat, you have to be kind of explicitly pro-Palestine now, and that might be the message that people take away. Keep in mind that Democrats in general, especially establishment Democrats, are not the most risk-taking people. They tend to be followers. They don’t skate where the puck is going, they skate where the puck was five seconds ago, behind the play. But that does make them predictable in a lot of ways.

I think people will extrapolate very heavily from this race, and properly so. You could make excuses for the moderates in the New York City mayor’s race — “okay, well, New York is pretty progressive.” Michigan is Michigan. Michigan is exactly what it looks like. We were looking last week at historical primary results. Michigan is now an early voting state, maybe the most important early voting state, because it comes right before Virginia and Super Tuesday. But Michigan voted for Bernie in what was it, 2020?15 It voted for John McCain in 2000, when that was one of the few states where he beat Bush. It voted for George Wallace in 1972, back in the day. It voted for Jesse Jackson. So Michigan has a little bit of a rebellious streak that maybe Ohio doesn’t.

Here’s my proposal, Eli: why don’t we take one of the Ohio senators and give it to Michigan?

Eli: Then they’d get three?

Nate: Michigan is quite a bit of a better state than Ohio, I would argue.16

Eli: I don’t have a dog in either fight, but I guess if I had to pick, I’d pick Michigan. I’m not a super partisan on either the Michigan or Ohio side. But if I had to pick, I’d go with Michigan.

Nate: No, I mean, Ohio doesn’t bother me. If you had to get rid of states, if you had to go to 48, obviously you would fold Delaware into Pennsylvania, and merge the Dakotas.

Eli: The Dakotas is the first, yeah.

Nate: And then what’s next on the chopping block? Rhode Island?

Eli: It’s got to be, right? You’ve got to do the small ones. I think after the Dakotas, you have to go by size.

Nate: Yeah, I think Rhode Island probably gets it next. Rhode Island [merged] into Connecticut.

So, readers, listeners: our plan for the week is that we’re going to probably have a “think piece” — well, it depends if Michigan is actually close — it might be more of a diagnosis of what’s going on. Probably Wednesday morning or late Tuesday night, we’ll have some type of what-it-all-means piece, and then we’re mostly focused on the model. Hopefully we’ll get you a sports article or something at some point. But full disclosure, we’re probably looking at a week from Monday, give or take a day, for the model. If it winds up being this week, it wouldn’t be the thing that surprised me the most in the world. But usually it’s pretty rare that toward the deadline things resolve faster than you’re expecting.

Eli: And we’ve also usually found that unless you’re trying to launch before some sort of deadline — for example, before the NFL season starts17 — it’s good to take some extra time with the landing pages to make them look nice and work well before we launch them.

Nate: The honest truth of when will the model be ready? It’s probably Friday or Saturday. You don’t want to launch things on a Friday or Saturday, especially in the middle of August. That’s some standard media advice that we’ve found holds up in the Substack world.

[Though] here we are, Eli, on a Sunday, having a very, very, very wonky conversation. Maybe more wonky than I expected. But maybe we’ll end on that note. So everyone, lots coming soon. There’s lots of backlogged content that I’m looking forward to writing when these back-to-back projects with the World Cup and the midterms are ready to go. So a little slow for a week here, but then I think we’re going to have a great August.

Thank you so much for listening and for subscribing.

Eli: Yeah, have a good week, everybody.

The presidential nomination process is a strange “game.” Early states like New Hampshire and South Carolina don’t actually have very many delegates, and Democrats use a highly proportional system, so it’s very unlikely that they’ll prove to be the tipping-point states in determining who wins the majority at the 2028 convention. They matter mostly to the extent that the media and “party elites” (e.g., donors, elected officials, partisan influencers) believe they matter and treat them as reliable signals about the viability of the candidates.

And sometimes those expectations can be gamed. In 1992, Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin received 76 percent of the vote in the Iowa caucuses, with “uncommitted” in second. But this produced little in the way of momentum for Harkin because Bill Clinton and the other candidates had taken their ball and gone home. The media went along with this small conspiracy to deny Harkin his momentum1, camping out in New Hampshire instead. Clinton dubbed himself “The Comeback Kid” despite finishing second there to Paul Tsongas — and the media went along with that framing too.

So I don’t want to treat the order of states too mechanically. Although “momentum” can be measured statistically though indicators like national polls, candidates will seek to manipulate expectations and exploit various biases in media coverage. Moreover, the early states aren’t typically that predictive of the nominee. Many of them have a lifetime success rate below 50 percent in picking the eventual winner.

But having built a model of the primaries in 2020 — honestly, maybe the most complicated forecast we’ve ever designed — I have quite a few thoughts about the new calendar. Don’t worry: we’ll have a lot more coverage of the midterms soon. (Yes, we’re finally making excellent progress on the model.) But this is the first newsletter that I’m going to label as a Model Talk column related to the 2028 election.

That’s because last week, Democrats proposed their 2028 primary calendar:2

• South Carolina: Saturday, January 22, 2028

• Nevada: Tuesday, February 1

• New Hampshire: Tuesday, February 8

• New Mexico: Tuesday, February 15

• Michigan: Tuesday, February 22

• Virginia: Tuesday, February 29

• Super Tuesday: March 7

Did Democrats forget about Iowa? Nope, after a colossal screw-up in reporting results in 2020, Democrats relegated it outside of the early-voting window. Meanwhile, New Hampshire has been demoted to holding the third primary.

New Hampshirites will complain that the state has a law requiring it to have the first primary.3 I don’t see why the Democratic Party or anyone in the other 49 states should really care about that4 — though along with Iowa, it might try to hold an earlier, unsanctioned contest. If these states seek to defy the calendar, the question is whether candidates and the media play along.

In 2008, Michigan and Florida jumped the queue in the primaries, and were punished with having their delegates stripped.5 Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama pledged not to campaign there — though Clinton sort of cheated on this promise in Florida, while Obama wasn’t even on the ballot in Michigan. Clinton’s wins in these states were treated, at least in my recollection, with an extreme asterisk by the media, providing only some fraction of the momentum that they usually would.

Putting minority-heavy states first could help moderate candidates

Nobody has a right to complain too much about the new calendar, though some progressives are kvetching about it. It’s reasonably well balanced between different parts of the country and the different racial groups that make up the Democratic Party. And it probably diminishes the importance of the first four states, regardless of their order, as compared to #5 and #6: Michigan and Virginia, which will offer opportunities to build up momentum before Super Tuesday, when far more delegates will be at stake.

Still, overall, I would say the new calendar puts a slight thumb on the scale in favor of more moderate candidates.

In most cases, you might associate concerns about racial equity with the more left-wing factions of the Democratic Party. There is, however, an ironic twist when it comes to the perpetual debates about the primary calendar: it’s usually the moderates who express more need for racial balance.

The reason is a phenomenon that might seem counterintuitive, but is well-known to any veteran of the process. White voters overall are more conservative than members of racial minority groups. But among Democrats, the ideological ordering is reversed. White Democrats are generally really liberal, while Hispanic and Black Democrats are more moderate. You’re seeing that play out in Michigan right now, where Haley Stevens is hoping for a strong performance among Black voters to come back against Abdul El-Sayed’s coalition of white liberals and Arab-American voters in the state’s primary next week.

In data I gathered from the Cooperative Election Study from 2016 through 2025, 65 percent of white Democrats identify as “liberal” or “very liberal”. But only 44 percent of Hispanic Democrats and 41 percent of Black Democrats do so.

All of these figures probably lowball the liberal share we’ll see in 2028, both because the Democratic Party is becoming more liberal and because more progressive voters are usually more enthusiastic than moderates and turn out at greater rates in the primaries. But I don’t see any particular reason to expect a reordering of the relative ratio of progressives to moderates among the different racial groups within the party.

Let’s take the rest of this in three stages. Since this is a Model Talk column, hopefully you’re not averse to a little bit of obsessive detail. Because in the primaries, small details tend to matter.

• First, I’ll show you some data on the ideological makeup of the new First 6 states. (And the other 44 states also.)

• Next, I’ll show you the historical results from the early-voting states, plus now demoted Iowa.

• And then, I’ll describe some findings from our experience in actually modeling the primaries about how much the order of the states matters in the first place, and even speculate a bit about how this might affect some of the leading candidates.

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Now that the World Cup is over, we’re fully focused on getting the midterm forecast up and running as soon as possible. I’m going to be honest that between publishing a ton of stories over the past two months, highly competitive primaries, redistricting, and various other distractions, this has taken a little longer than we were hoping for. So we’re going to err on the side of publishing less for the next couple of weeks until the model is ready to go.

However, one benefit of working on the model is that there are usually some fun spin-offs from the various data that we collect for it. For instance, in calculating the state-by-state correlations used by the model, we rely on voter-level microdata from the Cooperative Election Study, a large-sample online survey conducted every year or two. We’ve aggregated responses to the CES in each year it was conducted during the “Trump Era” — from 2016 through last year — into a dataset of more than 400,000 voters.

That gives us high-fidelity data for capturing voting trends among smaller subgroups that usually get lost in the shuffle. Today I’m going to focus on one such group: voters with high educational attainment but low to middle incomes. Because income and education are positively correlated, there aren’t all that many of these voters. I’d argue, though, that they’re vital to understanding emerging trends within Democratic politics, and particularly the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

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The DSA occupies the high-education, lower-income corner of the electorate

As a result of contentious Democratic primaries in Michigan, Maine, and New York, I’ve been reading a lot of conversation about the role that class plays in voting patterns in the United States. In these primaries, candidates like Graham Platner and Abdul El-Sayed who are associated with democratic socialism often claim to have the mandate of the working class. But in practice, their strengths tend to be with college-educated voters. Even before his scandals, Platner wasn’t particularly doing better among voters without college degrees than previous (losing) Democratic nominees in Maine. El-Sayed has relatively weak support from Black voters in polls, meanwhile.

But does that make them hypocrites? For what it’s worth, they certainly both have interesting backstories. Platner didn’t graduate from college, but came from a fairly privileged background. I don’t think it would be unfair to classify him as “downwardly mobile.” El-Sayed is in some ways the polar opposite: a first-generation American who went to a good public school in suburban Detroit and is obviously a high-achieving person.

The larger point, though, is that I think we ought to be careful about conflating class with educational attainment. Apologies for the cliché, but class in America reflects a tapestry of race, educational attainment, and income/economic privilege — and even that doesn’t capture everything.

I’m reminded here of Peter Turchin’s elite overproduction hypothesis. It basically argues that America is producing “too many” college graduates relative to the number of high-prestige, well-paying jobs available to them. People who wind up in this situation often carry heavy student loan burdens or other sorts of debt. Even if their material situation is objectively “just fine,” it’s rarely great. They’re gloomy about their own financial prospects, and feel aggrieved about the state of the country. Their class status is ambiguous: privileged in some senses, but they’re part of the “have-nots” in other meaningful ways.

What would be ideal here, to get closer to the notion of class, is if we had data on voters’ family backgrounds. Did they grow up rich or poor? Were their parents white-collar or blue-collar? Did they go to a private high school? Unfortunately, you’ll rarely, if ever, see this sort of question in political surveys, even ones as comprehensive as the CES.

Still, we can get a fair amount of texture by running through various permutations of income, educational attainment and race, all of which are available in the CES. I’ll look at who these voters preferred1 in the 2016 through 2024 presidential elections.2 Putting race aside just for a second, I’ve classified voters into four groups based on educational attainment, cross-hatched with five groups based on their self-reported household incomes.3

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Based on this grid, what is the most Democratic voting group in America? It’s voters with postgraduate degrees but lower-to-middle household incomes of $30K to $60K per year.

This is very much also the sweet spot for the DSA. In the group’s most recent member survey in 2021, 80 percent of members aged 25 or older had bachelor’s degrees, but 45 percent had household incomes below $60,000 per year.

This is unusual, because education and income are usually substantially positively correlated. In the composite CES data, only 19 percent of Americans with bachelor’s degrees or higher had household incomes of $60K or below. The DSA rate is around twice that.4 These voters aren’t necessarily “blue collar” in the sense of working with their hands. But that doesn’t mean they’re privileged. Common occupations among DSA members include teachers, non-profit workers, social workers, and public sector employees.

By contrast, who are the most Republican voters in the country? It’s not necessarily voters with a lot of “economic anxiety”. Rather, it’s the precise opposite corner from the DSA: high-earners who didn’t attend college. About 60 percent of voters with a high school education or less, but whose households earned incomes of $60,000 or above, preferred Trump to the various Democratic presidential candidates. (You can probably think of various stereotypical professions here too: small business owners, independent contractors, real estate developers, used-car dealers, etc.)

Could this just be some weird composite artifact of race? In the DSA’s 2021 survey, 85 percent of members reported their race as white5, which certainly isn’t representative of the country or the Democratic Party overall. But in the broader CES data, we find that the patterns mostly hold once you disaggregate by race. Let’s speed-run through the various major groups. Here is the CES data on voting by income and educational attainment among white voters alone.

Among whites, there’s particularly strong stratification in political preferences by educational attainment, with incomes making less difference. Still, there is some very mild “U-shapedness” — i.e., both the poorest and the richest whites are more blue than middle-income ones. The most Democratic group among all white voters is the same one as in the aggregate data: voters with graduate degrees making between $30K and $60K per year.

Next, the same numbers among Black voters:

While it’s true that Black voters are not a monolith, their preferences are notably more uniform than for whites — and mostly very blue. But what’s the most Democratic Black voting group? You guessed it — Black voters with graduate degrees earning $30K to $60K per year. In fact, with 95 percent of voters who meet this description voting for Democrats, it’s probably the most D subgroup in the entire voter universe.

How about among Hispanics?

This chart hits a bit differently. Among Hispanic voters, voting is considerably less correlated with educational attainment than among whites. However, Hispanic voters earning higher incomes are considerably more Republican than lower-earning ones. Hispanic-Americans (and Asian-Americans) have high rates of small business formation. As I’ve argued in the past, Democrats may be doing a poor job of appealing to entrepreneurially-minded Americans — and DSA-type messages may be particularly unappealing to them.

Still, it’s basically the same pattern again. The top-right corner of Hispanic voters (high education, low-to-middle income) is blue. The bottom-left one (high income, less education) is much more purple.

High-education, lower-income voters are cultural libs, too

Another complication with candidates like Platner and El-Sayed is that much of their messaging isn’t focused on bread-and-butter economic issues. Instead, like other Democratic factions, democratic socialists can believe in the “omnicause”. Apart from Medicare for All, the signature issue of El-Sayed’s campaign is Gaza, with a huge amount of his campaign communications focused on the extensive spending by AIPAC and affiliated groups in support of his opponent, Haley Stevens. Meanwhile, in his message announcing he was formally withdrawing from the campaign, Platner signed off with a series of cultural signifiers — “F*ck ICE.6 Free Palestine. Up the Hearts” — the latter a reference to Portland, Maine’s professional soccer team.

That’s not to say the DSA wouldn’t be better off in the long run if it were more agnostic on cultural issues. Even Bernie Sanders once had relatively moderate stances on immigration and guns. Even Zohran Mamdani has backtracked from his more left-wing positions on issues like policing.

But politicians who truly have some long-term vision are rare. Most of them are trying to play the ball where it lies. The fairway consists of college-educated, mostly younger, mostly white progressives who are disillusioned by their economic opportunities and/or with the direction of the Democratic Party. We could get into the sociology behind this, but this is a group that typically uses “post-material” cultural issues as their rallying points.

In addition to asking voters about their presidential preference, the CES also asks voters to rate their ideology on a scale from 1 (“very liberal”) to 5 (“very conservative”). “Very liberal” wasn’t a very common response: only around 10 percent of the electorate. But which voters were most likely to check the “very liberal” box?

You’re probably getting the hang of this by now: it’s voters with graduate degrees making between $30K and $60K a year. Some 21 percent of those voters say they’re “very liberal”, about twice the population average.

As I discussed last week, voters who describe themselves as very or extremely liberal tend to place more emphasis on cultural issues — particularly gay rights, trans rights, the environment, race relations and Israel/Palestine — as compared to other voters. They’re only about average or even a little below-average in how much they prioritize things like health care and jobs, by contrast.

So what Platner and El-Sayed are doing might be smart politics, particularly in El-Sayed’s case given Michigan’s relatively high number of Arab-American voters.

Noah Smith recently argued that the “socialist left” and the “woke left” should be regarded as separate political movements. But I’m not so sure that’s true. This data helps to explain the relationship. Messages like “Fuck ICE” and “Free Palestine” are catnip for college-educated liberal Democrats of all kinds. Culturally left-wing but economically comfortable Democrats are probably more likely to join other Democratic factions like the #Resistance. Culturally left-wing but more “economically anxious” ones are potential targets for more anti-establishment factions like the DSA, by contrast.

DSA members aren’t necessarily struggling to pay the bills, nor are most of them traditionally “blue-collar”. But they’re likely to be genuinely upset about their station in life as well as how things are going with the country. Without wanting to psychoanalyze too much, it can be appealing to anxious-feeling voters of all political persuasions to feel as though they’re part of some greater, more altruistic struggle against corrupt elites or injustice. The DSA is betting they’ll stick around for the socialism — but the culture wars are often what get them in the door.

Last week, we got some big news about a certain Democratic Senate candidate. No, not that guy. I’m talking about State Senator Mallory McMorrow suspending her campaign in Michigan. McMorrow was a rising star in Democratic politics and was the clear favorite of bettors on Polymarket to win the Michigan primary through late April. To be fair, she did perform well in some early polls of the race. But McMorrow was running with Rep. Haley Stevens to her right and Abdul El-Sayed to her left. Eventually, she was squeezed out of her position in the middle.

Now we’re down to just two active Democratic candidates in Michigan, and unlike some other high-profile Senate primaries, it’s a real moderate vs. progressive contest. Stevens is backed by Chuck Schumer and AIPAC, and was recently endorsed by Gary Peters — the seat’s retiring occupant. Outside groups are also running ads implying an endorsement from former President Obama, but it’s actually a clip from 2018.

El-Sayed, on the other hand, has picked up endorsements from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. He’s also highly critical of Israel.1 “For too long, our foreign policy has been handed to us by the likes of the state of Israel and AIPAC, who has made sure that Democrats and Republicans are doing their bidding,” he said in a debate with Stevens on July 7. For his part, El-Sayed has even criticized Obama’s tendency to compromise.

If this dynamic sounds familiar, that’s because we’ve seen it play out across the country in Democratic primaries this cycle. And so far it’s mostly gone the same way. Everywhere from New York City to Colorado to, yes, Maine, progressive outsiders have been trouncing safer establishment picks.2 Is it a Democratic Tea Party? I’ll leave that for another column. But all the signs of this pattern continuing in Michigan are there. McMorrow started tanking in the polls shortly after she criticized El-Sayed for campaigning with left-wing influencer Hasan Piker, whom she called “a provocateur, to put it lightly, who says things that are misogynistic and antisemitic, and said that the United States deserved 9/11.”

Even Stevens took steps to distance herself from Israel’s government in her latest debate with El-Sayed. After Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticized her on CNN, she said he has “not made us safer, has not brought us closer to peace. And he’s endangered Jews here in America and around the world.” But is that too little too late to stop populists from racking up another victory? And if El-Sayed does win the primary, could that sink Democrats’ chances of retaining the Michigan seat, and, by extension, of reclaiming the Senate?

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Are progressives cruising to another victory in Michigan?

The basic El-Sayed skeptic’s position is this: Michigan isn’t New York City. You still need to win the general, and El-Sayed’s progressive issue positions are too far left for a state Donald Trump has carried twice. Stevens has made that same case. Aside from run-of-the-mill progressive stances like Medicare for All, El-Sayed supported defunding the police back in 2020. He also voted “Uncommitted” during the 2024 presidential primary as a form of protest of the Biden-Harris campaign.3

One could also cite misgivings that voters might have about “outsider,” lefty candidates after the Graham Platner disaster, but the comparison isn’t fair to El-Sayed. His credentials are impressive, from being a Rhodes Scholar and a star student-athlete to the Health Director of Detroit. He’s also run for office before, having finished a (distant) second in the 2018 gubernatorial primary against Gretchen Whitmer. His biggest scandal is calling himself a physician while never having completed a residency or being licensed to practice medicine. He can be extremely combative, however, and confident to the point of overconfidence — perhaps fittingly, since he hosts his own podcast.

But despite what could easily be considered baggage in a purple state like Michigan, El-Sayed was the clear favorite to win the primary before McMorrow dropped out. Prediction markets saw him as the third-place candidate early in the race, but he’s been on an upward trend since April. Prior to McMorrow’s exit, Polymarket gave him an 85 percent chance to clinch the Democratic nomination.

This was a case where the polls and betting markets aligned. The three most recent Michigan Democratic primary polls in the New York Times database before McMorrow dropped out were El-Sayed +5, El-Sayed +19, and El-Sayed +7. In fact, the last poll prior to McMorrow’s exit where El-Sayed wasn’t leading came back in May. And polling averages of the race only showed El-Sayed’s lead increasing in June.

That’s not entirely surprising. The war in Gaza has become an important issue in Democratic primaries, and Michigan has the largest population of Arab Americans of any state in the U.S., per capita. That group swung away from Democrats in 2024, at least in part due to criticism of the Biden-Harris administration’s approach to Israel. In Dearborn, which has the largest Arab American population share in the country, Trump won 42 percent of the vote in 2024, compared to 37 percent for Harris, and 18 percent for Jill Stein. El-Sayed could bring some of these voters back into the Democratic fold.

But perhaps McMorrow’s departure has given moderates a second chance. What if 80 percent of McMorrow voters flocked to Stevens? The race would get competitive. In fact, that would be enough to put her ahead if you take an average of all pre-dropout polls. But that approach gives a lot of consideration to older polls, conducted before El-Sayed really took off. If you downweight older polls, El-Sayed improves to a 42-40 lead even with just 20 percent of the McMorrow vote.

But post-dropout polls are more promising for Stevens. The first, conducted by Tavern Research, found El-Sayed up by 3 points when all three candidates were included on the ballot, but Stevens ahead by 1 point in the two-candidate matchup.4 Nearly every former McMorrow supporter in that poll moved to Stevens. And this week, a Glengariff/Detroit News poll showed Stevens leading with 48 percent of the vote to El-Sayed’s 41 percent.5

The new polls seem to indicate that the race has tightened. Part of that could come down to Stevens drawing support from more former McMorrow supporters than early polls suggested. Or perhaps the Platner fiasco is boosting moderates’ morale just a bit. Those Obama ads might even matter; Stevens held a large lead among Black voters in the Glengariff poll.

The Peters endorsement, which came after the Glengariff poll, could help, too. Endorsements aren’t usually decisive, but receiving the nod from the two-term incumbent of the seat you’re trying to win is a real “get.”

However, a Data for Progress poll showed almost the complete inverse result: 54 percent for El-Sayed compared to 41 percent for Stevens. But that poll was commissioned by American Priorities, a pro-El-Sayed super PAC. In general elections, candidate-sponsored polls typically exaggerate their candidate’s standing by a margin of about 4 points. We don’t have a comprehensive database of internal polls in primary elections, so we can’t say what the average bias is there, but the Data for Progress poll is showing a divergence from public polls large enough that the firm is putting its credibility on the line.

Would El-Sayed make Michigan competitive in November?

Michigan is a must-win for Democrats if they want to retake the Senate. It’s also an open seat in a year where the national environment should be good for Democrats. True, Trump has won the state twice, but they were narrow victories. This isn’t a scenario where you want or need a high-variance candidate.

Instead, you’d want someone with minimal potential downside who can coast to an easy win on anti-Trump vibes and solid campaigning. Stevens would seem to fit that bill. She’s not an electoral superstar (her Split Ticket WAR scores range from R +0.9 to D +2.8), but she’s not an underperformer either. Being a generic normie Democrat might make things harder in a primary, but it’s a boon in a general where even a neutral performance would likely net you the win. Our forthcoming forecast would also give Stevens some extra credit for held elected office when El-Sayed hasn’t. That’s not to say El-Sayed can’t win, but he’s certainly the riskier choice.

However, Democratic primary voters aren’t just optimizing for electability. While 25 percent of likely Democratic voters in the latest Glengariff/Detroit News poll said the top quality they’re looking for in a nominee is someone who can win in November, 38 percent said it was the nominee being a fighter who would stand up to Trump. If you’re looking for an anti-establishment fighter, El-Sayed is the obvious choice. The bet is that perhaps El-Sayed’s more left-wing views cost him some support relative to Stevens, but his odds of winning are still solid in this Michigan environment, and if he does, Democrats will get a Senator who better aligns with the party’s changing priorities. El-Sayed would also be the only Arab American in the U.S. Senate.

But that’s all very vibes-forward. The data tells a somewhat different story. If you take a simple average of all Michigan general election polls conducted this year, there’s essentially no difference: Stevens’s average margin against presumptive Republican nominee Mike Rogers is D +0.7 compared to El-Sayed’s D +0.2. However, El-Sayed outperformed Stevens in three of the five most recent polls, and they performed equally well against Rogers in a fourth.

On the other hand, one could argue that there is a pollster quality issue here. Michigan pollsters have a mixed track record. The only pollsters in this group with an A/B rating or higher are TIPP Insights, Glengariff Group, and Emerson College. Polls from those firms show Stevens leading Rogers by an average of 2.8 points, but El-Sayed trailing him by 2.5 points.

So … not to rehash the Moderation Wars for the umpteenth time, but this one comes down to your priors. If you think more moderate candidates generally outperform left-wing candidates, you can cite evidence from the higher-quality polls demonstrating that Stevens is the safer choice. If you don’t, you can emphasize recency instead, since the latest polls generally show El-Sayed doing at least as well in November.

There’s also a chance that the electoral environment will be blue enough by November that it won’t matter. Michigan is a truly purple state: Trump carried it by about 1.4 points in 2024 while Biden won it by 2.8 points four years earlier. But as of this post, our generic congressional ballot average is sitting at D +6.1. If that’s what the national environment looks like in November, you’d also expect the Michigan environment to be around D +6.1 according to our state-level benchmarks.

So even if El-Sayed underperforms, he’d have to underperform in a big way to lose Michigan in this environment. That’s not impossible, but just 23 percent of races in the Split Ticket WAR database (which runs from 2014 through 2024) feature a candidate under- or overperforming by more than 6 points.6 And many of those races featured consistently strong incumbents — such as Susan Collins, Jon Tester, and Joe Manchin — or consistent underperformers like Ilhan Omar. An open-seat race doesn’t fit that bill, especially because large over- and underperformances are simply rarer than they used to be.

If El-Sayed wins the primary, the general election is likely to be seen as a referendum on the electoral viability of populist, left-wing, Israel-skeptical candidates. An El-Sayed win in November will be taken by many as a sign that the progressive populist wing of the party is fully in control. But if El-Sayed loses, that same movement will potentially take the blame for costing Democrats the Senate.

Here at Silver Bulletin, we’ve frequently critiqued President Trump, the Democratic “establishment”, “Resistance Libs”, the left, the “tech right,” and the Republican Party. What’s missing from that list? We’ve had less to say about the political tribe that I at least vaguely belong to myself: the center-left.

How does one define the center-left? Well, that isn’t entirely straightforward. As Matt Glassman writes, “moderation” is associated with a cluster of attributes, including but not limited to: centrism, pragmatism, independence, willingness to compromise, obsession with “electability”, comparative optimism about the status quo, liberalism, and a preference for more complex, technocratic approaches toward governance. These aren’t entirely synonymous with one another and some elements can be in tension.

But put a pin in that for now; we’ll come back to it later. Because there’s a more pressing question: is the center-left at risk of losing its influence — even dying out, becoming the Blockbuster Video of politics1? For a cautionary tale, you need to look no further than the center-right, which has been almost completely hollowed out, with most of the public intellectuals who once occupied that space either having become Resistance Libs or joining the Trump Train.

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The death of the center-right didn’t come all at once. In fact, Republicans reacted to the failures of George W. Bush by nominating John McCain in 2008, probably the closest thing to a truly independent-minded presidential nominee in the modern era.2 But having the misfortune of inheriting Bush’s mess amid the worst financial crisis in 75 years, McCain lost to Barack Obama by more than 7 points. Mitt Romney then fended off the Tea Party in 2012, but also lost to Obama.

The repeated failures undoubtedly contributed to Trump’s rise to power. Trump zagged toward the populist, anti-immigrant right when the RNC “autopsy” after 2012 had recommended zigging toward the center — although he also pledged to protect Social Security and other entitlement programs, avoiding some of the most unpopular parts of the Bush-Romney agenda.3 Trump openly criticized all three of Bush, Romney and, of course, McCain. (“He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”)

The center-left could find itself in a similar predicament. According to statistical measures of their Senate voting records, Joe Biden wasn’t really a centrist in the same way that McCain was. (Biden has always been much more of a loyal partisan, for one thing.) But Biden did win the 2020 nomination, helped by a cluster of endorsements and perhaps a “flight to safety” among voters as COVID hit American shores. Biden’s nomination came against literally more than two dozen alternatives, many of whom mistakenly assumed that Bernie Sanders’s strong performance in 2016 against Hillary Clinton heralded the rise of the left wing.

But maybe those candidates were just premature, not wrong. Although Graham Platner’s implosion was a setback for the left, they’ve been flexing their muscles in races from New York City to Colorado. And according to Gallup polling, the share of voters who describe themselves as “moderate” has fallen from 43 percent in 1992 to 33 percent today. Within the Democratic Party, meanwhile, self-described liberals now outnumber moderates almost 2:1.

These trends come despite the fact that, in the same Gallup polling, far more voters describe themselves as “independent” than ever before, with both major parties being deeply unpopular.

This puts the center-left in an awkward predicament. Voters might want independence from the major parties. But they don’t necessarily want more moderation; in fact, they are more willing to experiment with more radical approaches. However, the parties themselves are as partisan as ever, and social media tends to reinforce those orthodoxies. (So does Substack: Silver Bulletin is the only newsletter in the U.S. politics Top 10 classified as non-partisan by independent researchers.) Excessive partisanship may drive away moderates — but if they exit the primary voter pool, that only makes the remaining voters in the Democratic primary electorate even more progressive and partisan. Outnumbered in the Democratic Party, but having little in common with the MAGA-fied version of the GOP, the center-left is at risk of becoming politically homeless.

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The center-left is losing the argument about why Democrats lost in 2024

What’s more, the center-left risks being associated with the failures of the Democratic Party establishment — when, from a center-left standpoint, the problem was really the opposite: that the establishment moved too far to the left. More specifically, that Biden, despite his moderate reputation, was far too deferential to the progressive staffer class and “the groups”, particularly on immigration and on stimulus spending. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris and the rest of the Democratic Party couldn’t escape the shadow of Peak Woke. Remember this?

“Hopium” and motivated reasoning about public opinion don’t help either, as Democrats and the cosmopolitan, coastal news media are prone to mistaking the views of their most vocal opinion leaders and the most enthusiastic primary voters for those of the rest of the electorate. In a series of New York Times polls of key Senate races earlier this month, one that projected Democrats to come up slightly short of the four seats they need to flip the Senate in November, 53 percent of voters said that the Democratic Party was too far to the left, as compared to just 8 percent who said they were too far to the right.4

But Democratic primary voters, like Republican ones, increasingly occupy a separate universe. The Yale Youth Poll recently asked voters to select the more important issue for their vote from a randomly selected pair of 30 issues. Among all voters5, Israel/Palestine only tied for 25th out of 30 issues, winning just 28 percent of head-to-head “matchups”.

But among self-described “extremely liberal” voters, Israel/Palestine won 45 percent of the time. Gay and trans rights also got huge boosts. These differences are likely to be even more profound among the most politically active voters, to the point where views toward Israel have increasingly been a litmus test in certain Democratic primaries.6

Even if the media is overstating the importance of flashpoints like Israel and trans rights, enthusiasm matters a lot, and the center-left’s pet issues — affordable housing, I guess? — don’t tend to appeal to people’s passions in quite the same way. Turnout is overrated in general elections, but very important in primaries. In the primary in New York’s 10th Congressional District, where Brad Lander ousted incumbent Dan Goldman in a race with a heavy emphasis on Israel, just under 84,000 people voted out of a population of 750,000. That’s reasonably high by New York standards, but still only 11 percent of the population.

5 ways to define the center-left

Maybe the center-left can attribute some of this to bad luck. Still, making excuses is never a winning strategy in politics. And part of the problem is that the center-left may face an identity crisis. There are several different frameworks that you might use to categorize it.

First, you can describe the American political landscape in terms of partisanship. This chart of the voting record of Diana DeGette — a mainline progressive Democrat who was recently defeated by a DSA-backed challenger in her Colorado primary — categorizes all members of Congress from liberal to conservative based on their roll-call votes. In this conception, there isn’t really a center-left or anything in the center at all. Instead, the center-left is absorbed within the Democratic Party mainstream.

Actually, I lied. You can find one truly centrist Democrat: Jared Golden of Maine’s 2nd Congressional District:

But guess what? Golden, who has massively overperformed partisan baselines in his district, announced his retirement in November when faced with a primary challenge from Matt Dunlap, the Maine state auditor who is significantly to his left.7 That the Democratic Party is moving to the left doesn’t mean that the overall electorate is. In fact, that’s what you’d expect if centrists exit the coalition and so the coalition shrinks.

If you survey voters rather than looking at voting records in Congress, there is more of a middle — people who are “cross-pressured” between different views. Swing voters aren’t a myth. But their numbers are in steady decline amid ever-increasing partisanship. There’s no particular reason for a voter’s views on say, abortion, Gaza and taxation to be correlated with one another, but in a system with two extremely entrenched parties, they increasingly are.

A third alternative is to view the center-left as one of three major factions within the broader Democratic Party coalition, as I did in my story on Heather Cox Richardson that distinguished three groups:

• The Left

• Resistance Libs

• Abundance Libs

In this conception, the Democratic establishment is largely associated with the Resistance Libs and not the more centrist-leaning, pro-growth Abundance Libs. Even as polls show the Resistance Libs becoming increasingly discontented with their party, they tend to be highly defensive of Harris and Biden and convinced that they didn’t beat Trump because Democrats don’t “fight” hard enough.

But this framing isn’t common in mainstream media coverage of the Democratic Party. Instead, most news outlets treat “liberal” and “left” as synonymous, and many Democrats dubiously characterize candidates like Harris and Gavin Newsom as “centrist”.

A fourth approach is to set the parties aside and look for underlying ideological clusters, as I tried to do in my 2023 story on liberalism. That post defined “liberal” in a more European sense in opposition to the progressive left — not the way the term is usually applied in the United States. In other countries, liberalism is defined by its advocacy for individual rights, the rule of law, and a market-based approach to economics. (Though many liberals prefer a mixed economy and varying degrees of redistribution later on.) In this conception, liberalism is a separate third thing and a distinct ideological tradition that doesn’t fit neatly into the left-right spectrum.

My 2023 post now reads as slightly dated. The term “Social Justice Leftism” was my clumsy euphemism for the woke left — which I argued had some decidedly illiberal characteristics such as only lukewarm support for free speech. Still, there are things I like about this ideological triangle. I like that it recognizes liberalism as a separate and, in fact, philosophically well-grounded view rather than an ad hoc set of compromises and edge cases.

The triangle also helps to explain why both the Democratic establishment and what remains of the non-Trump Republican establishment find themselves in awkward positions. The Democratic establishment is trying to straddle the left and liberal traditions, but is increasingly struggling to hold the coalition together. The center-right, as we’ve said, is in even worse shape.

Finally, you could conceive of the U.S. as a parliamentary system. In Europe and other Western democracies, you can basically identify five major ideological clusters:

• 🔴 Labor/Social Democrats

• 🔵 Conservative/Tory/Christian Democrats

• 🟡 Liberal/Center-Left

• 🟣 Populist/Right-Wing/Nationalist

• 🟢 Green/Socialist/Hard Left

Yes, in the European tradition, the party colors are typically reversed from the convention in the United States, with left-leaning parties being red and right-leaning parties blue. And you can debate the semantics of exactly how this would map onto the United States.8

The important thing is that in this conception, liberals have their own party, rather than being part of Labo(u)r. However, this comes at a cost: they usually aren’t all that many voters’ first choice, especially in countries with strong polarization. In the United Kingdom, for instance, the Liberal Democrats have about 11 percent of the seats in Parliament, and that’s actually a recent high-water mark that resulted in part from the profound unpopularity of Tories and Labour. The real energy these days is often more in the extremes, like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally or Britain’s Reform UK. The liberal parties, however, do tend to play nice with others and often play an important role in helping one of the major parties form a coalition government.

Questions for the center-left

However it’s defined, we’re overdue to ask some questions of the center-left. I have a lot of questions, in fact, because I’m not sure how well things are going. The headline teases it as 12 questions, but it’s actually 52 (!) questions organized into 12 clusters.

In an earlier draft of this article, I paused after each cluster to give my “answers.” But that feels too didactic. You’re welcome to infer my opinions from the way the questions are posed and from what I’ve written previously in the newsletter. (I’ve also included a few editorial comments in footnotes.) But the questions are not intended to be rhetorical: I think these are generally hard issues that the center-left perhaps does not reflect upon enough.9

The questions are roughly sorted by importance, with the first four clusters being the ones I consider to be more existential.

The “Core 4” questions

1. Should the center-left explicitly avow liberalism as opposed to centrism, moderation or compromise? Is it a separate third thing with distinctive characteristics, or a sort of a 70/30 blend of progressivism and conservatism? If the latter, how does the center-left address the critique that it doesn’t really stand for anything?10

2. What is the center-left’s relationship with the Democratic Party “establishment”? Is it part of the establishment — even synonymous with the establishment? Or does it want to keep the Democratic Party at arm’s length? If the center-left seeks to channel its power through the Democratic Party, what risks does that pose as the establishment becomes increasingly unpopular? Either way, how does the center-left convey to voters that it should not be held responsible for the failures of said establishment, particularly its recent choice of presidential candidates?

3. What is the center-left’s strategy for dealing with an increasingly angry electorate? How does the center-left win Democratic primaries when Democrats want candidates who “fight”? Would an “angry center” attract more converts in an era where controversy and grievance often motivate voters? Or should the center-left bet that appealing to people’s more rational, dispassionate sensibilities will come back into fashion?11 How much should it emphasize non-ideological attributes like civility12 and candidate integrity or character? If the center-left is generally more optimistic than other political factions, should it lean into this or de-emphasize this? How does the center-left persuade voters that America has made significant progress when this view is increasingly unpopular and Americans have become less patriotic?

4. What is the center-left’s view on how capitalism is going as we pass the quarter-pole of the 21st Century? How much does the center-left prioritize economic growth versus distributional issues? Does it think government spending should be smaller or larger as a share of GDP? Is an “abundance” agenda neo-liberalism in sheep’s clothing? (And if so, is that a bad thing?) What is the center-left’s approach toward the tech sector and particularly toward AI?

Other important tactical and strategic questions

5. How organized should the center-left be — in terms of raising money, endorsing candidates, and seeking to increase voter turnout for its preferred candidates? Put another way, how much does the center-left want to engage in the “dirty work” of politics? Should there be more or fewer formal structures such as PACs, think tanks and congressional caucuses? Would building such infrastructure necessarily require the center-left to be part of the institutional Democratic Party?

6. What is the center-left’s approach toward poll-driven selection of policies and candidates? Does it too often default toward making arguments on “electability” grounds when it really prefers a given policy on the merits?13 How should the center-left feel about left-wing (or even right-wing) positions that are comparatively popular, or center-left/liberal positions that are unpopular? Even if it’s true that more moderate candidates overperform, how does the center-left win the intraparty argument over electability when many influential Democrats are disinclined to believe this?

7. Should the center-left join the Resistance Libs in regarding Trump as a 5-alarm, existential threat to American liberal democracy — or as something that will pass? Should it advocate for “vote blue no matter who”, because of Trump, as part of some broader “pro-democracy” coalition?14 If the center-left is part of the coalition, is it holding up its side of the bargain when leftist Democrats win primaries?

8. Should the center-left regard the “DSA left” as a threat to liberal values? If it does view the DSA as illiberal, how does it persuade “normie Democrats” about this at a time when the left appears to have a lot of momentum and much of the party is risk-averse and trend-following? Alternatively, are there issues where the center-left can find common ground with the capital-L Left against the mainline Democratic establishment?15

9. What is the center-left’s attitude toward the center-right and other non-MAGA parts of the Republican Party? Would the center-left have more leverage if it more often aligned with or even voted for Republicans? Would it be better off if the center-right were rehabilitated, potentially enabling a broader center coalition? In the abstract, would the center-left be satisfied with a parliamentary-type system in which it’s almost never the largest party but often plays kingmaker?

10. What is the center-left’s strategy for avoiding both the perception and the reality of elitism, especially given that it tends to attract high-earning, successful people? How much should it care about diversity of various kinds? How does it avoid Davos-type groupthink? Does it think the “expert class” is performing well or poorly? Does it think there’s too much or too little democracy? Does it share a Progressive Era vision for technocratic paternalism, or does it tend to defer to popular sentiment and self-determination?16

11. Can the center-left credibly regard itself as more pragmatic and evidence-driven than other political factions? Are they the “reasonable voices in the room”, or is this too self-flattering? Aside from effective governance, how does it demonstrate this to voters in a politics dominated by motivated reasoning and “vibes”? Should the center-left be low-key — or explicitly17 —utilitarian?

12. How does the center-left navigate Israel/Gaza? Can it accommodate people with widely divergent views on Israel and carve out a middle ground at a time when an increasing number of highly politically active Democrats view Israel as a litmus test? How can it avoid the “smalltentism” that defines other Democratic factions, especially when the center-left’s numbers are not all that large?

I suppose I’m hoping to get a debate started about these questions. And yes, that potentially includes here in the comments section. But keep in mind that Silver Bulletin has an extremely politically heterodox readership as compared to most Substacks. So please be kind and give other subscribers the benefit of the doubt.

1. You can say something like “Graham Platner, who has credibly been accused of sexual assault, doesn’t have any right to dictate terms”. But he won the party nomination. It’s his choice whether to vacate that nomination. Under Maine law, the practical rule is: Platner must withdraw by July 13 for Democrats to make a normal replacement nomination. After that, a replaceable vacancy generally requires death or catastrophic incapacitating illness or injury.1 As we’ll get to, Platner doesn’t have as much leverage as he thinks he does, but he does have some.

2. One theory of the case I’ve heard on Twitter is that if Platner remains on the ballot, Democrats will be forced to rally behind him. But as cynical as I sometimes am about the Democratic Party, I tend to doubt it’s that simple. We haven’t seen any post-sexual-assault-allegation polling yet, but if Platner is behind Collins by 10 points or something, the correct “play” is to write the race off and focus your resources on Texas or Iowa or whatever, rather than further undermining the party brand by associating it with a candidate whom almost every Democrat has now denounced as being unfit for the ballot. And while a Senate seat is very important, it isn’t as existential as a presidential race.

3. The write-in deadline in Maine isn’t until Aug. 25. So what the state party could say is, “We’re going to choose a different nominee and will back them in an extremely well-organized write-in campaign even if Platner refuses to vacate the Democratic Party ballot line.” The state party has already taken a fairly aggressive posture toward Platner, but pre-committing to this write-in process would more tangibly reduce Platner’s leverage and is the right move from a game-theory standpoint. While a write-in campaign might seem like an uphill battle that requires extra effort from voters, it worked for Lisa Murkowski in Alaska in 2010, a state with some similarities to Maine.2

4. Wouldn’t that lead to an outcome like: Collins 47 percent, write-in Democrat 33 percent, Platner 20 percent, meaning that this would be tantamount to mutually assured destruction? No, because Maine uses ranked-choice voting. In principle, voters loyal to Platner could list him as their first choice and the write-in as their second choice ahead of Collins. In practice, there are some issues, though. In the Maine gubernatorial primary last month, which went to RCV, about 10 percent of the votes were essentially tossed out because voters did not rank enough candidates.3 Platner voters could also refuse to list the write-in Democrat on their ballot out of spite.

5. So really, whether he remains on the ballot or not, most of Platner’s leverage comes from his voters. There’s sure to be some voters who remain fiercely loyal to him; partisanship is a hell of a drug. You don’t want those voters to feel aggrieved, as though their guy was railroaded out, especially if Platner sends signals to that effect.

6. While many people are drawing comparisons to Democrats’ decision to force out Joe Biden in 2024, there are some important differences. Platner isn’t nearly as much of a loyal party soldier. But more importantly, Platner won a highly competitive primary, whereas Biden won an effectively uncontested one. True, Janet Mills eventually dropped out4, but she did so because she was way behind in the polls, out of resources, and going to lose. Beating a sitting governor is a lot harder than beating Marianne Williamson in a race where the Democratic Party put a heavy finger on the scale for Biden.5

7. The comments section might not like this take, but I think it’s not inherently unreasonable for the Maine Democratic Party to respect the results of that primary by choosing another nominee who, like Platner, is more in the populist/progressive tradition.

8. Not only is this more democratic, but it also prevents those voters from feeling aggrieved. And while I’m generally of the view that moderate candidates overperform left-wing or right-wing ones — Collins is a good example of this, in fact — Maine has been a bit unusual in being willing to tolerate a wide variety of ideological options, from progressive fighters like Platner (who was quite popular before the scandals and probably on track to win in November) to Collins to the Trumpist former governor Paul LePage.

9. The best way to give voters some say, though, would be to hold a straw poll or a series of state caucuses or conventions, as Maine Democrats are reportedly strongly considering. Sure, such a vote would probably be dominated by “party activist types”, with much lower turnout than a “real” primary, but you want to keep your most engaged voters happy6 — and it’s still better than some sort of committee.

Those nine points cover my basic theory of the case, but let me take an even deeper dive into the strategy and the long-term implications for paid subscribers.

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Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Maine, was accused today of sexual assault in a story reported by Politico.

The allegation has to be taken seriously: the accuser identified herself by name and, according to Politico, provided corroborating materials, including communications about the assault with her therapist and with a friend before Platner became a major political figure. The woman had previously referred more obliquely to “reckless” and “unsettling” behavior by Platner in a New York Times story published last month.

Having worked in major newsrooms before, including the New York Times and ABC News, I can tell you that these stories are heavily “lawyered.” A high-prestige news outlet is unlikely to publish such allegations unless it believes they are well-supported. And Platner is plausibly litigious. In June, Platner referred to a claim by a reporter on Fox News that he was a “pathological liar” as “false and defamatory” and brought up the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox, which was settled for almost $800 million after Fox personalities falsely implied that the 2020 election had been rigged.

Platner, nevertheless, has denied the allegations — “any accusation of nonconsensual behavior is categorically false,” he said in a video he posted today. But he also said he was taking time to “reflect on the best path forward” for his campaign and the best way to defeat Susan Collins. Much of the video was phrased in the past tense.

Traders at prediction markets think it is very likely that Platner will drop out. As of Monday evening, they give Platner just a 3 percent chance of being the next U.S. Senator from Maine. After Collins, at 37 percent, the next-most-likely election winner is Troy Jackson, at 34 percent. (Jackson, a progressive Democrat, came in third in Maine’s recent gubernatorial primary.) Under Maine law, Platner has until next Monday (July 13) at 5 p.m. to withdraw from the race. The Maine Democratic Party would then have two weeks (until July 27) to replace him with a new nominee.

Interestingly, Democrats’ chances of winning the Maine Senate race actually improved on the news because traders think another Democrat would have a better chance against Collins.

Indeed, in our previous newsletter about Platner, we noted that he had lost altitude in polls after a series of sexting allegations surfaced in late May. Ahead of Collins by an average of 6 points before those allegations, he’s led by just 1 point since then, in a state where polls have frequently underestimated Collins and other Republicans. There’s been no particular sign of a rebound; in fact, two of the three most recent polls showed Platner trailing Collins.

It’s not exactly rocket science to suggest that Platner would be an underdog if he remained in the race. The sexting allegations were much less severe, but damaged his margin against Collins by 5 points. And now he has no more lead to spare.

The left should want nothing to do with Platner

So what are the takeaways here? The left has been on a good run in Democratic primaries lately, having ousted two incumbents in New York and one in Colorado with current or former DSA candidates. I owe you a newsletter on that; it was actually set to publish tomorrow before this latest news in Maine.

But who are the three most successful left-wing politicians in America? I’d argue they are pretty clearly Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

What do they have in common? They might have significant ideological baggage in a swing district. In a series of New York Times polls of key Senate races last week, 53 percent of voters said that the Democratic Party was too far to the left, as compared to just 8 percent who said it was too far to the right. Twitter and Bluesky aren’t real life. But that’s not really a problem in New York City or Vermont.

And what Bernie, Zohran and AOC conspicuously don’t have is a whole lot of personal baggage. Mamdani, in particular, cultivates a clean-cut image by constantly wearing a suit and cheering for the local sports teams.

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You can say there’s a double-standard for candidates on the left. In my view, their success in recent primaries is both fairly predictable and arguably something the Democratic establishment “deserves”. As early as April of last year, Galen Druke and I both wanted to take Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez #1 in our Democratic primary “draft”, meaning we thought she was more likely to be chosen than someone like Gavin Newsom.

But even if Democratic voters are shifting to the left, that only goes partway to explaining the success of the DSA challengers. Democrats want candidates who are “fighters”, whether that means fighting Trump, fighting billionaires, or whatever else.

There’s no reason, though, for that to be attached to a long series of personal scandals that have nothing to do with a candidate’s position on the political spectrum.

And to be fair, some prominent voices on the left conspicuously aren’t circling the wagons around Platner. Hasan Piker today called the allegations “reliable” and said it was “curtains” for Platner’s campaign. The Nation called for Platner to be replaced.

I’d note here the left, at least in this case, has been quicker to revise its views when faced with “candidate quality” problems than the Democratic establishment has sometimes been in the past — and quicker than Republicans have been, certainly.

Why I became a Platner skeptic

After many years of covering politics, I think voters tend to have some instincts for which candidates they feel are “authentic”. We’ve covered Platner a lot, and at first I took a position of detached irony toward him. He’s from Sullivan, Maine, the tiny town where I spent many summers at my grandma’s house. He’s certainly not lacking for a swaggering charm. And his polls against both Janet Mills and Collins held up fairly well when the story was “just” about his Nazi-themed tattoo and his Reddit posts.

Part of why I grew skeptical of Platner after the sexting allegations is that I thought it called his redemption arc — that his decision in 2007 to get the tattoo had been a silly drunken mistake, for example — into question. It’s highly implausible that Platner didn’t become aware of the symbolism of the tattoo at some point before having it removed last year, and there are numerous accounts that contradict his story.

Platner’s campaign also took a highly aggressive posture toward Genevieve McDonald, Platner’s former political director, who left his campaign in October. Given that the sexting allegations were far less serious than a sexual assault claim, it was reasonable to ask whether they reacted in this way because they knew there were more serious allegations that might come to light.

There are other critiques that one can make of Platner also. He grew up with a fair amount of privilege. He was recruited by consultants and activists who saw him in a video shot by a local ecological conservation organization.

Few of us are boy scouts. At some point, though, you pass a threshold where someone’s story doesn’t add up.

I could get cute here and cite something involving reading poker “tells”. Generally you’re not looking for any one sure-fire sign — someone rapidly blinking their eyes, for instance — so much as a cluster of behaviors that are collectively more powerful than any one indicator individually.

But although poker players have more experience in precisely quantifying this, it’s actually a very natural human instinct and one that probably becomes better with experience. You might excuse a “problematic” element in someone’s personality, or two. But most of you have probably also had a moment where you learned that you were wrong to give the benefit of the doubt to a friend or coworker. “Fool me twice, shame on me” has always been one of the wiser proverbs.

Plus, political parties have to think probabilistically, too. Maybe it’s all a series of extremely unfortunate misunderstandings and coincidences. Democrats aren’t in a court of law, however, where they have to prove allegations beyond a reasonable doubt.

Should he remain on the ballot, Platner will be a burden for Democrats’ ability to win a majority this November. Progressives will probably want Jackson to replace him, while the establishment might make one last pitch for Mills. But that’s what the argument should be about, not trying to rehabilitate his campaign once more.

I’m going to admit to feeling a swell of patriotic pride after the U.S. beat Bosnia-Herzegovina 2-0 on Wednesday.1 Maybe it was a protective reaction after the bullshit red card the referee gave Folarin Balogun. Or maybe it was the juxtaposition of everyone singing along to “Country Roads”2 in the middle of Silicon Valley, not necessarily considered the most patriotic place in America.3

So congratulations to the United States on its 250th birthday, which the country will celebrate tomorrow. It’s really quite an accomplishment if you’ve spent any time studying the rise and decline of empires. And I hope you’ll have a fun and restful July 4 weekend, readers. I very much don’t want to rain on the parade. I’m also relatively optimistic about the future of the country. I’m a big defender of the complicated national project we’ve undertaken over the past two-and-a-half centuries. I love the United States, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be here for the rest of my life.

However, an increasing number of Americans don’t agree with me, to a degree that I found frankly surprising. We assigned this story to Eli in our weekly planning meeting, and I expected the data to show that, while American patriotism had declined, it remained relatively high as compared to the rest of the world. Some informative content that was a little on the lighter side, if we’re being frank.

But that isn’t the case. Compared to most countries, we’re now a little below average in patriotism.

So I just wanted to let you know where we’re coming from. Our goal here at Silver Bulletin is to evaluate public opinion for what it is, not to reflect our personal views every time we analyze the polls. (And even if we don’t necessarily agree, we understand why an increasing number of Americans feel ambivalent about the United States.) I thought this was a better way to approach the occasion than a hot take from yours truly. –Nate Silver

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What the polls say about patriotism

By Eli McKown-Dawson

“It was a grand day for the Bicentennial parade in the nation’s capital today, and it was a grand parade celebrating the diversity that is America.” That’s how The New York Times described America’s bicentennial celebration in 1976. The parade drew 500,000 people and featured Johnny Cash as the Grand Marshal. Our 200th anniversary also included a Grand Parade of Sailing Ships in NYC and a tour of the country by Queen Elizabeth II. When Gallup asked Americans in June of that year how much we had “succeeded over these 200 years in achieving the ideals for which this country was founded,” 77 percent answered either a great deal or a fair amount.

The vibes aren’t anywhere near that good for our semiquincentennial. The Great American State Fair has had problems with power outages and crowd sizes — and the celebration in general has a decidedly partisan flavor. Many of this year’s events are being put on by Freedom 250, a Trump-backed public-private partnership.4 The president also promised to “make a really long speech” before the fireworks begin in DC.

Being mad about the Great American State Fair is something we’d be tempted to characterize as “very online” behavior. But increasing skepticism about the United States isn’t just an online sentiment. In 2004, Gallup found that 69 percent of U.S. adults were “extremely proud” to be an American. The fourth wave of the World Values Survey (WVS) also ended that year and showed that a similar 71 percent of Americans were “very proud” to be American. Fast forward to 2026, and just 33 percent of adults are extremely proud to be American, according to Gallup, while the latest WVS wave showed an only slightly higher 46 percent in 2022.

To be fair, as Natalie Jackson pointed out earlier this week, the Gallup write-up only focused on the “very” or “extremely” proud categories. Some 75 percent of U.S. adults are at least “moderately” proud to be American, according to its data, a figure in line with other polls from YouGov and Fox News. Anti-American sentiment isn’t likely to be a winning argument, even in Democratic primaries, let alone in general elections.

How American pride compares to the rest of the world

Still, there has been a real decline in patriotism that I don’t think we should discount. Historically, American pride was somewhat exceptional when compared to other countries, so much so that the American tourist who slaps an American flag on everything is a common trope. Have smaller countries — particularly those in Latin America, the Middle East, and parts of Asia — always topped the patriotism charts? Absolutely. In the latest WVS wave, 97 percent of Jordanians were “very proud” or “quite proud” of their nationality, while 92 percent of Venezuelans and Colombians felt the same.

But we used to hang with that crowd. In the first WVS wave, concluded in 1984, 95 percent of Americans were very or quite proud of their nationality. That figure was higher than the average share in Latin America (83 percent) and much higher than the European average of 77 percent. Throughout the late 20th century, the U.S. was a patriotic outlier compared to other large developed nations and our peers in Western Europe. Just 19 percent of Germans and 32 percent of French people were very proud of their nationality in the 1993 WVS wave, compared to 74 percent of Americans.

Fast forward to 2022, and “just” 78 percent of Americans were very proud or quite proud of their nationality; that’s a 17-point drop since the 1980s and lower than the 2022 European average of 81 percent. People in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East are hovering closer to 90 percent pride, on average. While other regions’ national pride has held steady or increased, ours has fallen.5

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It isn’t just the smaller countries either, which arguably have more national cohesion. Let’s pare down the WVS dataset to countries that have populations of at least 100 million or that are OECD members. We’ll create a “pride-o-meter” score for each country from 0 to 100 based on the four categories of responses.

You have to scroll down to the third page to find the United States. We’re 34th out of 45 qualifying countries. Americans are now no more proud of their country than Brits.6

Yes, patriotism is becoming more partisan

That decline in pride has happened across the board, but it’s been most pronounced among Democrats, particularly since Trump entered the political scene. To level-set, majorities of Republicans (96 percent), independents (59 percent), and Democrats (58 percent) are still proud to be Americans, according to YouGov. But when it comes to more intensive national pride, Democrats are nowhere near where they used to be.

During George W. Bush’s second term, an average of 58 percent of Democrats were extremely proud to be American according to Gallup, as was an identical share of independents — though Republicans were higher. The rough parity between Democrats and independents lasted through Barack Obama’s second term, but the share of extremely proud Democrats fell to an average of 30 percent during Trump’s first term and was just 14 percent in the most recent Gallup poll.

Although Republicans are generally more patriotic, their opinions can shift based on who occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue too. The share of Republicans extremely proud to be American fell from 79 percent on average during Bush’s second term to 60 percent during Biden’s term. What happened after Trump retook office? It jumped right back up to 74 percent.

But did Democrats’ numbers bounce back under President Biden after Trump’s first term? Nope. They held steady at 30 percent. Some of this is probably attributable to changing attitudes about the nation’s founding and subsequent history that accompanied the Black Lives Matter movement.

Still, Trump seems to be the bigger story here, and perhaps even caused a permanent shift in attitudes. Echelon Insights recently polled Americans about “conditional patriotism” and found that 49 percent of Democrats agreed with the statement “how patriotic I feel depends on who is in power and current government policies.” The figure for Republicans was 18 percent.

Perhaps it’s rational that our pride advantage over other nations has evaporated. We’re still the world’s largest economy, but we’re not as clearly dominant across the board as we were in the ‘80s and ‘90s. The growth in American life expectancy has stagnated. And the U.S. is no longer as democratic as it once was, according to various democracy indices, even if we’d debate the notion that the country has passed some tipping point.

Still, a shared belief in the American project once served as a hedge against the “alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge,” as Washington put it. These days, even the joint gold medals by the U.S. men’s and women’s hockey teams at the Milan Olympics devolved into some indecipherable partisan argument.

Maybe if we win the World Cup? It’s not likely, granted. But at this point, a return to America being a profoundly patriotic country is probably a long shot too.

Today’s newsletter is a guest post from Joel Wertheimer. Joel is a civil rights attorney in New York and has served as a policy consultant to political candidates. He worked for President Obama from 2015 to 2017 as Associate Staff Secretary. He irregularly writes about data, soccer and politics at wertwhile.substack.com.

For nearly four years, the internet has debated whether we’ve been mired in what Kyla Scanlon dubbed a “vibecession” — whether people feel worse about the economy than the underlying data suggests they “should” feel. People as esteemed as Nobel laureate Paul Krugman have frequently posted about the vibes mystery. Nate wrote a whole piece about the divergence in the New York Times two years ago.

But there’s one big problem with the discussion: most of the participants are relying on a broken survey, the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment survey (“Index of Consumer Sentiment” or “ICS”), that is in dire need of being repaired. Failure to correct for these issues has led to plenty of pet theories — but they explain a trend that may not even exist.

On Friday, the survey reported a 49.5 reading for consumer sentiment, a number that, while slightly improved from last month, puts it below the depths of the Great Recession. But without properly correcting for the survey’s issues, the headlines are misleading. No, Americans are not as unhappy about the economy as they were during the Great Recession.

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What’s wrong with the University of Michigan survey

The University of Michigan ICS is the gold standard sentiment survey measuring consumer sentiment.1 The survey has historically shown a very strong correlation with “hard” economic data such as inflation and unemployment. But before more bad analysis gets done on the vibecession, people need to know they’re working with dubious data. As with election polls, the ICS has struggled amid a shift away from telephone polling. There are issues both with partisan nonresponse, with some political groups more likely to respond than others, and partisan expressive response, with survey-takers using questions about the economy to express political sentiment.

So the problems with the ICS are these:

1. The switch to online polling made responses more negative and,

2. There are too many Democrats in the sample.

Thus, ICS data since mid-2024 is not comparable to past periods. Here is the partisanship of the sample over time:

And Democrats right now say they hate the economy with Trump in charge.

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When adjusted for these issues, the ICS should be substantially higher than the Great Recession lows we have witnessed over the past year. Weighting the survey to Pew’s National Public Opinion Reference Survey — what Nate Cohn called “perhaps the most important poll you’ve never heard of” — would place the ICS at a level more like that in 2013, when the economy was growing after the Great Recession but unemployment remained stubbornly high and wages stubbornly low. This adjustment would bring the survey in line with other measures of consumer confidence, such as those from the Conference Board, Gallup, and YouGov.

The online version of the ICS finds more negative sentiment

Some background on the ICS: for most of its existence, the survey was conducted by phone and weighted to demographic variables: age, sex, race, education, income, and region. Beginning in April 2024, the University of Michigan began a phased transition from phone to web polling, becoming fully web-based by July 2024, as response rates to telephone polls plummeted. Michigan was meticulous about the switch and polled both by phone and online for a period to establish the validity of the online polling method, finding a .97 correlation between the phone and web series.

But as Ernie Tedeschi and Ryan Cummings have noted at Briefing Book, that came with a seemingly permanent level shift in the survey, of nearly nine points down. A high time-series correlation only means the phone and web series moved together; it does not rule out a persistent level shift, with web respondents consistently registering lower sentiment. If every group’s economic outlook declines roughly uniformly, the correlation will hide that.

After controlling for respondents’ demographic characteristics across the web and phone versions, Tedeschi and Cummings found that the mode effect was very strong. The correlation that the University of Michigan found is still there, but web survey takers persistently expressed much more negative views than those reached on the phone (a well-documented phenomenon in other surveys). They found a persistent downshift of almost nine points. My own similar analysis found a similar, although slightly smaller shift.

But there’s also another problem.

The ICS has too many Democrats

We all know that partisanship drives much of how people respond to polls about the state of the economy. And as partisanship has continued to increase over the past two decades, the effect on the survey has become more pronounced.

Under George W. Bush, partisanship led to a 15-point gap between Democrats and Republicans, controlling for demographics. By Obama’s second term, it was over 20 points. In Trump’s first term, it was 38 points, and that number was similar under Biden. But so far during Trump’s second term, the gap between partisans equates to nearly 53 points of consumer sentiment.

These partisan shifts might balance out — Democrats might be too bearish about the economy under Trump relative to the objective underlying facts, but Republicans would counteract that by being too optimistic. However, since Trump’s re-election and the mode switch, the Michigan survey has largely failed to capture Republicans’ views.

How come? The devil is somewhat in the details. The ICS uses a rotating panel design. Part of the sample is “fresh”, but a respondent can be reinterviewed up to three times.

But over the past two years, more Democrats have been recruited into the sample, and Republicans have fallen out. Moreover, Democrats who respond at the reinterview stage return at much higher rates than they did during the phone survey, whereas Republicans only return at slightly higher rates — in fact, the strongest Republican voters2 are following up with re-interviews less than they did during the phone era. Taken together, this has led to a huge partisan shift in the ICS sample.

Joanne Hsu, who runs the Michigan survey, tackled this question on May 22: “Are the relatively dour readings seen in recent months being disproportionately driven by Democrats?” she asked. “A closer inspection of data on multiple dimensions of the economy reveals a resounding no.” She defended that position by noting “Sentiment readings nationally […] continue to be fully aligned with the views of independents.” She produced this chart in support of her view:

But Hsu’s chart doesn’t tell the full story.

Just for a quick-and-dirty comparison, without applying any demographic controls, I took UM’s published data by party and compared it to the topline ICS. In my chart, the dashed green line represents a panel that’s evenly split between Democrats, Republicans, and independents — while the blue line shows a skewed sample of 50 percent Democrats, 25 percent Republicans and 25 percent independents.

As you can see, prior to the mode shift, the overall ICS figure (in black) matches the balanced, ⅓-⅓-⅓ panel extremely well. But since the mode shift — and the 2024 election — the survey tracks closely to the blue line, with a panel that has twice as many Democrats as Republicans.

It might be true that independents are relatively bearish on the economy. But that doesn’t explain away the partisan skew. Independents often express dissatisfaction with the political system and the direction of the country — that’s part of why they don’t affiliate with one of the major parties. Also, as Democrats have soured on their own party’s leadership, many Democratic-leaning voters now identify as independents but still usually vote blue. (Kamala Harris actually won independents in the national exit poll in 2024 despite losing the popular vote.)

What’s more, independents had a much more negative response to the mode switch than Democrats or Republicans:3

The Michigan survey tracks others — if you remove the mode and partisan biases

It’s understandable that surveys might want to adjust for party affiliation. Although what party a voter is registered with is verifiable data4, most polls instead ask respondents which party they prefer. This is a political attitude, and it can change over time.

Fortunately, we do have a very high-quality survey called the National Public Opinion Reference Survey that can address this issue. Published periodically by Pew, NPORS is an annual address-based survey, with paper, online and phone response options and financial incentives. It has a much higher response rate than most contemporary public-opinion surveys and is used to benchmark many other polls.

It is true that partisanship shifts over time, but the trend was towards more — not fewer — Republicans in 2024 and 2025:5

Pew also publishes the microdata (individual responses) from the survey. Using this data, I reweighted the ICS to reflect the actual partisanship of American adults, in addition to the mode adjustment described above. When both adjustments are made, ICS is still low historically — but not depths-of-the-Great-Recession low. Instead, it looks more like the numbers during Barack Obama’s first term, when he was re-elected with a weak but growing economy:

Notably, these numbers look a lot more like the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index:

For some further validation, I found Gallup and YouGov polls that ask respondents whether they are better off or worse off financially than they were a year ago, and compared them to an adjusted number6 from an identical ICS question.7 With these adjustments, the Michigan series moves pretty much exactly like the YouGov and Gallup numbers.

The conclusion is simple: the ICS cannot continue to ignore its sample’s skewed partisanship in the future. And people who write about consumer and voter sentiment shouldn’t ignore the problems either. President Trump is highly unpopular, and, in contrast to his first term, his economic numbers are worse than his overall ratings. But the Michigan survey exaggerates just how sour consumers are feeling about the economy – the vibecession is partly an artifact of bad data.

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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