Below is the transcript of our live edition of SBSQ, officially SBSQ #25 (the Barry Bonds edition). As always, you can leave questions for the next edition of SBSQ — which will run in early November — in the comments of this post.
The transcript has been edited for clarity, and we’ve added quite a few links so you can see that we … sometimes … actually know what we’re talking about. We’ve also added some signposting and the exact text of each question we answered. For context, regarding our comments about the Maine Democratic primary, our conversation took place on Monday …. and there’s been news since then. -EMD & NS
Nate: Welcome to the first-ever video edition of Silver Bulletin Subscriber Questions, officially edition #25. And say “hi” to Eli, whom I’m not sure you guys have seen in person, so to speak, before.
Eli: No, I don’t think so. So hello, Silver Bulletin subscribers!
Nate: You’re coming to us from where? From Washington?
Eli: From Washington, yes. With boxes of unbuilt furniture behind me.
Nate: Okay, I wouldn’t have hired you if the furniture had been built yet. That feels like it would be off-brand for me, if you were a rapid furniture builder. Eli, what was your experience like? So you published … would you say it was your first kind of “hot take” yesterday?
Eli: I don’t know. Was some of the flooding the zone stuff during the election a hot take?
Nate: It [was a] hot take that people maybe expected a little bit more.
Eli: Yeah, I’d say this is probably the first non-polling-related hot take.
Nate: We got a lot of comments on that post.
Eli: Yes, we did.
Nate: Yeah. Did we leave comments on for unpaid subscribers, or was it just the paid subscribers?
Eli: I didn’t change anything with the comments and I think by default it’s paid only, so yeah.
Nate: All right, well I’m glad you’ve been baptized.
Eli: Yes, I think we got a lot of comments on some of the stuff during the election last year, too, though — some of the controversial stuff on Twitter especially.
Nate: But look, let’s get to the subscriber questions. We both have a list, but I’m going to let you be the question asker.
In this edition of SBSQ:
Who’s winning the shutdown?
How hard would it be to start FiveThirtyEight today?
Our plans for new sports models
Why is Vermont so blue?
What do you think of Obama’s legacy?
Should Democrats run moderate candidates to win red Senate seats?
What’s going on with Graham Platner?
How much will the Jay Jones texting scandal matter?
Is there an innocent explanation for J.B. Pritzker winning $1.4 million gambling?
Does Rahm Emanuel have a shot in the Democratic primary?
Is it OK to make a tactical vote in the other party’s primary?
When does an election qualify as a “mandate”?
Closing (?) thoughts on the NYC mayoral election
Who’s winning the shutdown?
Eli: Sure. Do you want to start with the shutdown stuff?
Nate: I think that makes sense.
Eli: Yeah, we got a couple of pretty similar shutdown questions. Brian asked:
How should we, the average voter, distinguish between the signal and the noise when we evaluate the constant flow of polling data during a government shutdown?
And then Adam L. asked:
Is there a way to objectively quantify who “won” a particular government shutdown battle? Very hard to cut through to the facts, but it feels like a fascinating part of the political process that is probably hard to get solid reporting on.
Nate: I’m curious for your take. [Because] I think this is kind of a bad use of polling. People decided, OK, what does the first Washington Post poll that comes out the day after the shutdown starts say? Who gets blamed for the shutdown? To me, that’s not really a salient indicator of that much of anything, really. First of all, if people aren’t paying attention, they tend to assume that Republicans are more obstructionist. They tend to associate Republicans with previous shutdowns. All of those are reasonable priors.
But Democrats are, I think, objectively speaking, more responsible for the shutdown. They’re trying to shut down the government to raise attention to health care and other things. Republicans could, if they wanted, nuke the filibuster and pass the CR that way. But it feels weird when a narrow plurality of people in these polls blame Republicans. Does that mean they’re being misinformed? Number two, there’s been less polling on this than I expected. But Democrats’ advantage has gone from like 15 points to 10 points to 5 points. Number three, Eli, you track Trump’s approval every day. You want to talk about what’s happened with that?
Eli: The same thing that’s been happening with it over the past many months, which is not much. It had been on a bit of a downward trend before the shutdown. After the shutdown, it ticked up a little bit, then it went back down. His net approval rating has been between -8 and -101 for the past four months at this point. So far, not too much has changed. It’s uncommon for it to go up at all right at the beginning of a shutdown. But certainly, there hasn’t been a real downward trend in Trump’s approval rating as a result of the shutdown as of yet. So the blame doesn’t seem to be translating that way.
Nate: And maybe [there’s been] an upward trend a little bit [since the shutdown], but it’s hard to know. We attributed the slight dip to the Jimmy Kimmel thing. There was a little bit of movement around the Epstein stuff, but that Jimmy Kimmel thing, there was a sharp drop of two or three points. And it may [be reverting] toward a long-term mean of -7.5. But in the previous shutdown, Trump’s numbers declined. Typically, the pattern is that everyone’s numbers decline a little bit, and then they rebound when the shutdown is over. And for Trump, that hasn’t happened, despite there also being other news, and economic turmoil. There’s also good news for Trump: there’s a ceasefire in the Middle East. We haven’t written about that for the site because it’s not one of our topics.2
And if you look at the RCP tracking, Democrats have lost a point on the generic ballot. On other sites, it’s steady. The generic ballot, if you’re not as much of a dork as Eli and I are, is basically which party you plan to vote for in Congress next year. I guess you’d say, Eli, it’s the single most important overall benchmark of the environment. Those numbers have been a little bit disappointing for Democrats. And then there’s the notion of having a moment of focus in the news cycle.
All the news coverage this week was about the No Kings protests, which I think is the correct focus. I think those protests are actually more promising for Democrats than the shutdown. I don’t know if you want to go through the reasons for that: you have some evidence of mass participation, you have some penetration into norminess. And yes, it can be a little bit cringe, but whenever you have more normies it can be more cringe. I like the fact that it seems decentralized, but what’s your impression? I don’t know what winning means in this context, but I don’t think Democrats are actually accomplishing the goal of getting people to focus on any particular thing.
Eli: I think the reason why the “who do you blame for the shutdown” poll question isn’t a great use of polling is that it’s not clear what Democrats want the result of that question to be. Some of them are going down the “this is the Republican shutdown” track, but others want to focus on a “we’re doing this to protect health care and make sure your costs don’t go up” sort of thing. And so there’s not a clear message, and it’s not clear whether they want the shutdown blame or not. So I don’t think those polls are showing that anyone’s really winning or losing. I don’t know, I guess it would be a win for Democrats if they’re able to get the concessions on the ACA subsidies that they want, and then reopen the government?
