After an eruption of even more scandals among Republican Senate candidates, FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich returns to The Downballot this week to discuss the effect these sorts of scandals can have on competitive races; whether Democrats stand a chance to keep the House; and the different ways pollsters create likely voter models.
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Co-host David Beard and guest host Joe Sudbay also discuss Dr. Oz, puppy killer; the GOP’s hypocrisy regarding Herschel Walker’s ever-growing list of scandals; Texas Attorney General’s Ken Paxton desperate attempts to avoid testifying in an abortion case; and Brazil’s presidential runoff, where former President Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva remains the favorite despite far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro’s better-than-expected first-round showing.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
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Co-host David Beard and guest host Joe Sudbay also discuss Dr. Oz, puppy killer; the GOP’s hypocrisy regarding Herschel Walker’s ever-growing list of scandals; Texas Attorney General’s Ken Paxton desperate attempts to avoid testifying in an abortion case; and Brazil’s presidential runoff, where former President Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva remains the favorite despite far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro’s better-than-expected first-round showing.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
David Beard:
Hello and welcome. I'm David Beard, contributing editor for Daily Kos Elections. The Downballot is a weekly podcast dedicated to the many elections that take place below the presidency, from Senate to City Council. If you haven't, please subscribe to The Downballot and leave us a five-star rating and review. David Nir couldn't join us this week, but we do have Joe Sudbay, guest host on Sirius XM Progress and the host of State of the States, to guest host here with me. How is it going, Joe?
Joe Sudbay:
Well, first of all, thank you so much David for inviting me to cohost with you today. Very big shoes to fill, but I'm really excited to be here and it's quite an honor.
David Beard:
We're glad to have you. And why don't you start filling those shoes by telling us what we're going to be covering in weekly hits this week?
Joe Sudbay:
Well, there's so much to cover, but we're going to focus in on the Pennsylvania Senate race, a couple of scandals involving Dr. Oz and then … which we thought were the big scandals of the week ... but then here's the Georgia Senate race and Herschel Walker and his woes, which are just astounding. [We’ll] also spotlight the Texas attorney general's race, a race that really is so important for progressives around the country. We're also going to talk about the presidential election in Brazil.
David Beard:
Great. And then at the end of the show, we'll be interviewing Nathaniel Rakich for our deep dive. He's a returning guest where we'll talk about the FiveThirtyEight model, as well as his take on some of these scandals and what we should expect as we move to likely voter models in the polls. So stick with us. So Joe, you've got the great responsibility of doing the first ever non-David weekly hit. What do you have for us?
Joe Sudbay:
Well, I have been obsessed, of course, like all of us with the Pennsylvania Senate race, and of course John Fetterman, the Democrat running. It's the open seat, a Republican-held seat being challenged by Dr. Oz. And there was a lot, there's been a lot of chatter lately, that maybe Oz is catching up. And then earlier this week he had not one, but two, pretty ugly stories break about him. One was from The Washington Post about Dr. Oz, the doctor, and talking about his show. And I'm just going to read this line because it's so astounding. "During the show's run from 2009 to 2021, Oz provided a platform for potentially dangerous products, and fringe viewpoints aimed at millions of viewers according to medical experts, public health organizations, and federal health guidance."
Joe Sudbay:
He was a huckster. And he's out there telling people, “I'm going to approach the Senate the same way I approached being a doctor,” which would make him fit right in with a bunch of other Republicans being a huckster down in Washington. But this is, it's just so shocking. We've seen a lot of coverage of it over the years. But this Washington Post article really encapsulated it and just, it should be shocking. It should have been the most shocking story of the day. And I do just want to give the Fetterman team a shout-out because they do such great work with social media. They actually did an ad featuring Dr. Nick from the Simpsons, followed by Oz using very similar language. You have to see if you haven't seen it yet. So that should have been the biggest scandal of the day because, I mean, it's about his position as a doctor and the fact that he made millions doing it.
Joe Sudbay:
But it wasn't because later in the day we saw an article from Jezebel about his scientific experiments that killed over 300 dogs, including entire litters of puppies. I'm a dog person. I'm a really hardcore dog person. This one was a jaw dropper. I'd seen rumors about it. But Jezebel went in, they did the deep dive, they looked at his history of experiments at Columbia University. And big shout out to Kylie Cheung for doing that deep dive and for coming up with the report that during the course of 75 studies he published in academic journals, his team conducted live experiments on over 1,000 live animals, including dogs, pigs, calves, rabbits, and small rodents. 34 of those experiments resulted in the deaths of at least 329 dogs. So I don't think these are winning issues for Dr. Oz and I also don't think that the race is closing the way some are trying to intimate.
David Beard:
Yeah, it's been strange to see there's been sort of a movement of people talking about how this race has closed. And certainly it's in the polling closed a little bit, largely from Oz coming from absolute depths of despair to 40 or 41% while Fetterman is still in the mid to upper 40s. So it's strange, the reaction people have had. People have almost been excited to think about this idea of a close race in the media, which I don't think is, again, I think Fetterman still has a comfortable lead in and I think Oz needs something more than just scandal after scandal if he's going to genuinely make this a race where the two candidates are tied or you really don't know who's going to win. Sort of a big polling error.
Joe Sudbay:
Absolutely. Right. And he doesn't have much to offer people of Pennsylvania besides his quackery and killing dogs. And I just don't think that's a winning platform, David, I just don't, that's me.
David Beard:
Really putting yourself out there, anti- killing dogs.
Joe Sudbay:
So what do you see and what are you paying attention to?
David Beard:
So you think that would be the big scandal of the week, but of course Herschel Walker, never one to be outdone, has had an even bigger scandal down in the Georgia Senate race. Walker's, of course, the GOP nominee for Senate. He'd already been in hot water since he became a candidate for a bunch of serious allegations, lying about some of this past credentials, domestic abuse allegations. But now The Daily Beast has reported that he paid for a girlfriend's abortion in 2009. And of course, I don't think there's anything wrong with someone paying for an abortion, but that's not the view of Herschel Walker, who supports criminalizing abortion with no exceptions or the view of most of the Republican voters who voted for him in the primary, and presumably he'll need the votes of in the general election.
David Beard:
You would think this would be pretty disqualifying if you are really strongly anti-abortion and you are like, “abortion is murder.” This seems pretty bad and something you wouldn't want to vote for a candidate for. But of course, prominent conservatives are already out there making excuses as to why they still need to support him despite this. They can't take him off the ballot due to Georgia laws. So they're just coming to terms with the fact that basically no matter what he's done or comes out, they're going to support him anyway.
David Beard:
And of course, this story goes further in the wake of this coming out and Walker’s strong, aggressive denial, his son, Christian Walker, who’s sort of a minor internet celebrity and was a favorite of the right wing for being black, gay, and conservative, has apparently had enough of his father's campaign. He sent a number of very angry tweets. He accused his dad of threatening to kill him and his mom, saying that they'd had to move to flee from his violence multiple times. And of course, previously he had been supportive of his father's campaign. And I don't want to delve in too deep. Obviously, we don't know exactly what's gone on between him and his father. There clearly seems to have been some sort of abuse, seems fair to say, was likely in the situation, be that simply emotional or this genuine fear of violence. So that puts somebody in a tough situation. But he's certainly used his celebrity a lot during the Walker campaign to help himself. And so it's been interesting to see this now sudden turnaround.
Joe Sudbay:
Oh yeah. In the LGBTQ vernacular, we would call Christian Walker a homo con, and that's what he is. Joe My God, had a post ... a great blogger, Joe Jarvis ... had a post about it the other day and called it “Homo con turns on his dad.: And like he did it through Twitter. And then his video the day after was just so intense. Just the anger he has and the abandonment. And I don't want to get inside of anyone's intra-family relationships, but it's the kind of thing that Republicans would make hay with, A, and B, it's still amazing to watch the hypocrisy. The hypocrisy.
Joe Sudbay:
This is a party that is completely determined to control women's bodies and tell women they can't control their bodies. But when one of their buddies pays for an abortion, no problem. It's just so rancid. And the other thing it does, David, is it puts the abortion issue front and center again. And every Republican who's running this year, especially in the Senate, any Republican should be asked about this because they're all benefiting from the same donors. They're all benefiting from the same money. Do you want Herschel Walker? Are you cool with this? I think it makes the abortion issue front and center, and I think that's really important for Democrats.
David Beard:
Yeah. And this race has been extremely close in the polling, probably one of the closest Senate races in the country. So we'll have to see how this fully breaks out in the weeks ahead. And then obviously leading up to Election Day. In the spirit of down-ballot elections, I know you had a down-ballot election in Texas that you wanted to highlight and talk a little bit about.
Joe Sudbay:
Yes, of course. Because one of the reasons I love The Downballot is because I am obsessed with down-ballot races. And looking at attorney general races, there's really some really extremist running in states like Arizona and Michigan. You got Kris Kobach running for attorney general in Kansas. This is a guy who got sent to remedial legal classes by a federal judge in 2018 and had to just quit being on the board of We Build the Wall because they got indicted, but he's not even the worst. The worst is actually an incumbent. That's Ken Paxton.
Joe Sudbay:
This week we learned from AP that Paxton staff had to drop a series of human trafficking and child sexual assault cases because they lost track of the victims. They lost track of human trafficking and child sexual assault victims. So this is of course the week after we saw Ken Paxton running from a subpoena that was trying to be served on him about an abortion case. And this is the same Ken Paxton who was indicted in 2015 for felony securities fraud at the state level and has been able to push off the trial. This is the same Ken Paxton that's under investigation by the FBI for corruption, based on a case brought by staffers in the Texas attorney general's office.
Joe Sudbay:
And this is a guy who ... it just keeps going with this guy. The AP also reported that the corruption investigation also involved an affair with Ken Paxton. I don't usually care what people do in their private lives, but Ken Paxton cares about my private life. So it's out front and center. Ken Paxton also appeared on January 6th at the speeches on the Ellipse before the insurrection. This is a guy who is so corrupt. I mean, he just brings it to a whole new level and he is one of the top three races in Texas right now with governor and lieutenant governor.
Joe Sudbay:
He is the most vulnerable Republican by far. I've seen a lot of reporting, a lot of analysis from Texas that this could be a sleeper race. His challenger is Rochelle Garza. She's amazing. I got to interview her on SiriusXM Progress. She's been a fighter for reproductive rights. She actually had the only abortion case that Brett Kavanaugh ever was involved in. It's called Garza v. Hargan. When he was on the circuit court before he overturned Roe v. Wade. She represented a 17-year-old pregnant girl who was denied an abortion and she won her case. And she actually has notice ... it's called the Garza Notice ... that teens in immigration and custody must be given to inform them of their rights. And many of you might have seen her. She actually testified against Kavanaugh during his hearings back in 2018.
Joe Sudbay:
She's terrific. She can win. And the final thing I want to say is yes, it's the attorney general of Texas, but he impacts all of us. Paxton impacts all of us. He uses the courts in Texas. He finds right-wing judges, right-wing Trump judges to block policy. He's done it on immigration, he's done it on LGBTQ equality. He's done it on abortion rights. He's done it on the environment. He does it on everything and defeating Ken Paxton and will cut off that pipeline. So this is one of the races I think progressives around the country should really be paying attention to.
David Beard:
And I think you're right that this is a real sleeper because with these down ballot-races, there's always the question of people are primarily going to come and they're going to vote whatever the top of the ticket is, either Senate or governor in Texas. It's obviously the Governor's race and polling, at least right now, shows Abbott leading Beto by about high to mid single digits, seven points, something like that.
David Beard:
And that could change, but let's assume that it stays somewhere in that area, 5 to 10 points that Abbott beats Beto by. Then you have to imagine how does Garza get there from that point because most people are going to just vote down the ballot the same way. But you can imagine a healthy chunk of people who would generally vote Republican, who vote for Abbott, who are really turned off by all of Paxton antics, all of the controversies, everything. And are willing to vote for Garza. So you can imagine the Abbott-Garza voters existing and that's what she would need. Assuming things don't change more broadly to win this race when otherwise Republicans are presumably going to win most of the other statewides.
Joe Sudbay:
Right. And he did win in 2018. He got just over 50% of the vote. He lost by just, he beat a guy named Justin Nelson by about three-and-a-half percent. And Justin was a great candidate. I got to interview him too, but he didn't have much support. Rochelle Garza is really building a lot of support across the state. She just got endorsed by the San Antonio Express News, and there are probably going to be a lot of papers that will endorse Abbot again. But they don't ... No one wants to endorse a corrupt attorney general. He's not really a symbol of law and order. But anyway, and Rochelle is great too. She's just a terrific candidate.
David Beard:
Yeah, for sure. So lastly, I did want to do a quick wrap up in the Brazil presidential election that took place earlier this week where former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and current far-right President Jair Bolsonaro are headed to a runoff after Lula fell just short of 50% in the first round. He received about 48% of the vote to Bolsonaro's 43%. Bolsonaro of course, is the current far-right president of Brazil. Lula is a past president of Brazil from the left-wing of the country. A centrist candidate won about 4%, and a center-left candidate won about 3%. Those were the two other candidates who got more than 1%. So mostly went to these top two candidates already. You would expect that 7% to be more Lula friendly than Bolsonaro friendly. But obviously you don't know until that happens. Some, of course, may stay home. Polls pretty accurately predicted Lula's percentage of around 48%, just short of the 50% he would need to avoid a runoff.
David Beard:
But they undershot Bolsonaro by about six or seven points. He was polling around 36 or 37% in the average, and as I said, got about 43%. The other thing was that Bolsonaro's candidates did pretty well down the ballot. Now, Brazil's legislative politics are extremely fractured. They're just a ton of parties, so it's very hard to easily summarize. But Bolsonaro allies definitely did better than was expected. And I think one of the things that you saw was that the left and the center left both in Brazil and others who had been covering or observing the election were pretty disappointed. Despite Lula getting 48% nearly winning without a runoff because the polls had showed a wider margin. And I think of similar to 2020, they wanted a repudiation of Bolsonaro and what he stands for and all of his far right antics and this really terrible stuff about rejecting the results of the election and then destroying the Amazon rainforest and all that.
David Beard:
They wanted what we wanted in 2020. They wanted a repudiation. Like we wanted to repudiate Trump. And that's not what happened in 2020 really. That's not what happened here. Biden won and we did barely hold the house and the Senate. In Brazil, I think Lula is still the strong favorite, but the reality is Trumpism is here to stay. Bolsonaro and his allies are here to stay. Hopefully Lula will win that election, and then you just have to go forward from there and keep fighting it. These things are not going to go away anytime soon across the whole world. And we're going to keep fighting these sort of far right groups in the long term. It's not just going to be one election.
Joe Sudbay:
And it was really wild to watch because earlier in the summer, it wasn't clear that Lula was making the moves that he needed to. And I've been just following him from a distance, and it was really interesting. On Sunday, I'm seeing the incumbent president at 43% losing by millions and millions and millions of votes. And 43% [means] 57% of his country voted against him. And granted, it wasn't Lula getting the majority and avoiding the runoff, but it seemed to me as a complete outsider, when your incumbent president gets 43%, they're not popular. And granted, like you mentioned down ballot, there are a lot of Bolsonaro party members who did okay. But I was trying to look at the good side from an outsider perspective and really hoping that that margin holds or anything close to it, that would be a blowout in a runoff.
David Beard:
And the runoff is October 30th, so just under four weeks. There's a lot of elections taking place that week. Obviously the midterms or November 8th. Israel is having an election that week. Denmark is having an election that week. So they'll just be a ton of things happening in about a nine-day span. And we'll be covering all of it. So coming up next, we'll be talking with Nathaniel Rakich, the senior elections analyst for FiveThirtyEight. So stick with us.
David Beard:
Joining us this week for the second time is Nathaniel Rakich, a senior elections analyst for FiveThirtyEight. Welcome back.
Nathaniel Rakich:
Thanks, David. I get to call you David now, which is very exciting.
David Beard:
I know, I know. I've limited the podcast to one David for this week, so I've ...
Nathaniel Rakich:
You've finally won the power struggle. Congratulations.
David Beard:
Yes, for at least one week. We'll see how it goes next week. So as we talked about a lot in our weekly hits, there's been a couple of big recent scandals among the GOP Senate candidates in Georgia and in Pennsylvania. So what's your big take on these scandals and in on October scandals, these in general. How much of an effect do they have? Is there sort of a broader thing we can take from them or is it really specific by specific?
Nathaniel Rakich:
Yeah, we at FiveThirtyEight have kind of done the math on scandal. So I have a big database of federal and statewide office holders who have been hit by scandal since, I think it goes back to, 1990. And we used this to basically assess the electoral impacts of having a scandal kind of associated with you. And Nate Silver, who folks might know is the editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight, did an analysis back in 2018 where he looked at these candidates, took kind of like a simple model of how you would expect them to do in their election based on things like partisanship, generic ballot polling, things like that. And then looked at how they actually did with this scandal attached to them. And he basically found that on average, those candidates did nine percentage points worse than you would normally expect them to do.
Nathaniel Rakich:
So scandals certainly do have an impact. It's important to note though, that analysis went back in time to the nineties. It looked at a time when there was less polarization than there is today. Now a lot of folks, I think would be willing to put the scandal aside because you know, got to vote for your party line because control of the Senate or the House is too important. So I do think that it's not like we should expect Herschel Walker and Mehmet Oz to go down nine points in the polls right now. But I do think some kind of impact is probably to be understood, particularly, I think, for Herschel Walker. This abortion controversy really seems to be eating up the headlines down in Georgia. In Pennsylvania for Oz, it seems like local and traditional media aren't picking up on the story as much.
Nathaniel Rakich:
It's really just been kind of Jezebel and online outlets. So I think how much it's covered is really going to make a big difference there. But generally, I think that there can be an attitude, especially in the era of Donald Trump when he had about a bazillion scandals associated with him, and he obviously still won the presidency in 2016, that nothing can matter, scandals don't hurt candidates anymore. And I don't think that's true empirically, that at least it's not always true. So I think we definitely need to wait and see over the next couple of weeks how this might affect Oz and Walker in the polls.
Nathaniel Rakich:
My kind of educated guess is that this will hurt them a couple of points, a few points. Which of course is significant in close races, especially when they're already trailing. Then even if they were to not be affected at all, right, they need to actually gain in order to win those races. So my guess is that it might hurt them a little bit, but also probably maybe is just for the next few weeks and then maybe by election day the new cycle has moved on to something else. Voters kind of come home to their party and maybe in the end, it won't impact them too much. But I think there is a lot of uncertainty about it.
Joe Sudbay:
It's really interesting that about what you said about Trump kind of changing the rules and what has been really interesting, I think, is the way the Republican party has rallied around Walker. I mean, they had no choice and we talked about it earlier. But it really is kind of fascinating the way scandals have evolved really over the past five years. And it's a different kind of politics and we all know that. But it is really fascinating. It's going to be really fascinating to see how these particular scandals play out.
Nathaniel Rakich:
Yeah, I mean I think a key point is the comparison is to 2012. And Todd Akin in Missouri, the Republican party did abandon him. And I don't think that you would see that today. I think that's partially because both parties see these elections as kind of existential. If the other party were to take power, it would be kind of a doomsday scenario for them.
Nathaniel Rakich:
But then also, for the simple fact for Republicans, Georgia is just too important of a state to give up on. If this were, I don't know ... Well, I guess the Senate is close regardless, so every state matters. But Georgia is, according to our FiveThirtyEight forecast, the most likely tipping point state, so basically the most likely state to decide control of the Senate right now. And in fact, if you were to assume that Democrats win it, the odds in our forecast for the Senate, which are currently around 67% for Democrats, it would go up to 90% conditional on Democrats winning Georgia. So basically, if Republicans want to control the Senate, which of course they do, they have no choice but to dance with the one that brought them.
Joe Sudbay:
Part of the problem there is that Republicans are already in trouble in other swing states, like Arizona and New Hampshire, where poor candidates have put them in seemingly really bad positions against Democratic incumbents in states they otherwise might have been looking to as alternatives for Georgia, but now they're just stuck with Georgia. So, in that vein, a question I asked a while ago on Twitter that I want to get your take on is, of the Republican Senate nominees in these top tier states, and you can sort of define that however you want, there's a lot of pretty bad ones. So, I want to see, what's your take on who's the worst of the GOP Senate nominees and who is the best?
Nathaniel Rakich:
I think the worst candidate is probably Herschel Walker. You have a candidate who not only has no political experience, and so just hasn't gotten the reps in on the campaign trail, but also who clearly has all this baggage. We knew going into the campaign that there were these allegations that he had threatened to kill his ex-wife. We've learned since this abortion revelation. We've learned about the three children that he fathered who he hadn't publicly acknowledged. And quite frankly, given that history and his inexperience, who knows what else might be lingering out there.
Nathaniel Rakich:
In terms of the best Republican candidate, I guess it does depend on how you define the top-tier races. I think I'd go with Adam Laxalt in Nevada or Ted Budd in North Carolina, if you want to include North Carolina as one of the top tier races. I'm personally skeptical that, that one is going to be ... I think it'll be close in the end, but it's a situation where I think we all know. We've seen this movie in North Carolina before, right? It's going to be a four-point Republican win or something like that. But those are the two candidates who have elected experience. And I think that is so, so crucial. Having gone through an election before, having successfully won office before, you both get that name recognition and you get those reps on the campaign trail. You maybe get vetted in a way that Herschel Walker is now experiencing and failing.
Nathaniel Rakich:
That said, I don't think Laxalt or Budd by the standard of an actual politician are that strong either. Ted Budd won his first primary with a vanishingly small percentage of the vote. This was the year that North Carolina didn't have runoffs. And he won with like 25% in his first primary, I want to say. And then, Adam Laxalt won the attorney generalship of Nevada in 2014, which was a year where Democratic turnout really just completely plummeted. There was basically no Democratic gubernatorial candidate that year. And so, Republicans across the board just were able to walk into office in 2014. And then, of course, Laxalt lost in 2018. I don't necessarily hold that against him, because 2018 was such a good Democratic year. But yeah, I think probably Laxalt, just because he has that, he was a statewide elected official in Nevada. He got four years of statewide name recognition from being attorney general. He doesn't have any major scandals the way that Herschel Walker does. He doesn't have a strange history of odd comments like Blake Masters does, or Don Bolduc does.
Joe Sudbay:
Can we switch over to the House? Because, I'm really been intrigued lately how often I have seen, I call them the prognosticator crowd, which is not a slur. I'm really interested in what I've seen from Nate Cohn, for example, and Dave Wasserman. And we've seen the Cook Report over the summer telling us that it was just a question of how big the Republican margin was going to be. And now, we're seeing them talking in terms of more of a district by district battle, which sounds more like the Senate than the House. Nate Cohn this week, at The New York Times, wrote, "If the polls are right and election day were today, the fight for the House would be very close. It would be a district by district battle for control." I'm just interested in your thoughts on that. And we don't see a lot of House district polling, so how do we track this and how is it being determined?
Nathaniel Rakich:
Yeah, so we, at FivethirtyEight, in our House forecast, we currently give Republicans a 69 in 100 chance of winning the house. So, they're definitely favored. And I think that makes sense given Democrats' narrow margins and just basically the nearly inevitable tendency for the president's party to lose seats in the House in midterms. But that said, I think many people, as you mentioned, thought that this was a foregone conclusion at the beginning of the cycle. And really it has not. And of course, a 69 in 100 chance for Republicans winning means there's a 31 in 100 chance that Democrats will win. And think about, if the weather forecast said that there was a 30% chance of rain one day, you'd probably want to grab your umbrella, because it's 30% odds, things happen 30% of the time. So, yeah, I think it is a district-by-district battle, ironically. Because, I think in 2018 we did have a lot of district-level polls. That was really great, because I think the battle that year was seen to be the House.
Nathaniel Rakich:
I think, going into this year, people assumed that the Senate was going to be the real battle, and of course it is. But the House has proven to be more competitive than people thought. But pollsters haven't fit it into their budget to do a lot of house polls. And so, as a result, we really are flying a little more blindly. But that said, in terms of what folks use, I know that you guys at Daily Kos track the big four groups, so the NRCC, the DCCC, the party groups like that and where they're airing their ad reservations. I think that can be a great indicator of what the parties are seeing, which it's like looking through a fuzzy pane of glass at something. And then, yeah, there are a lot of internal polls of House districts as well. I think folks, like those at Inside Elections, and Sabato's Crystal Ball, and [Cook] Political Report, they're seeing a lot of internal polls that really guide their race ratings. I'm jealous of them often, because we don't get to see those internal polls, and I wish we could.
Nathaniel Rakich:
But in the end, for someone like me, who doesn't have access to these polls, I am looking at generic ballot polling. The House has become so polarized by party, for House voting specifically. You look at a graph of House election margins in 2020 versus presidential election margins, and it's practically a straight line. The correlation is so, so high. And so, if you just know what the national popular vote is going to be and the relative partisanship of each district, you can come within a few percentage points of the outcome.
Nathaniel Rakich:
There are a few candidates, like think of Jared Golden in Maine who consistently overperform the partisanship of their districts in the national environment, because they have an independent brand. But most House candidates really don't have that. And they're just seen as a stand-in for a generic Democrat and a generic Republican, especially in this day and age. And so, I'm looking at those generic ballot polls. And I think, in a situation where Republicans win the popular vote at all, that's a situation where, because of Republican gerrymandering and just the natural geographic disadvantage that Democrats are at, that would be a situation where it would be really hard for Democrats to hold the House in the event of a Republican popular vote win.
Nathaniel Rakich:
It would be competitive, I think, in a more even environment, a D-plus one environment. When you're getting into D-plus two, I mean, right now the generic ballot polls are somewhere between a one and two point Democratic lead on average, that's highly competitive, to Nate Cohn's point. But also there's still a month to go. Historically, those polls have gotten worse for the president's party the closer you get to Election Day. So, that's a long way of saying that, yeah, we're in an environment where maybe right now the House is a toss up, maybe slightly leaning toward Democrats. But given the movement, I think the FiveThirtyEight forecast's prediction of a slight Republican ... Republicans are more likely than Democrats, but “it's competitive” is the correct overall assessment.
Joe Sudbay:
In terms of beyond the generic ballot and the partisan lean, those are obviously maybe 90 plus percent of the important aspect of things, what are the things that FiveThirtyEight looks at in their model to tweak those races beyond those two big numbers?
Nathaniel Rakich:
Yeah, great question. Obviously, individual district polls, and for the Senate and for governor's races, the individual state polls. When we have those, those are the most important factors in the FiveThirtyEight forecast. But then, yes, we use a sequence of "fundamental" variables. So, partisanship is a big one, but also incumbency still matters a little bit. The moderateness or extremeness of the incumbent candidate as measured by how often they break with their party is something. So, all things being equal, candidates closer to the center tend to do better.
Nathaniel Rakich:
The strength of the opponent, so we have a scale going back to our earlier conversation, we have, I think it's a four-point scale for assessing the quality of the opponent, where zero is never run for office before, and four is a sitting governor running for Senate or something like that, basically an equivalent kind of move, a lateral move. And then number one is like municipal office or something. Number two is state legislator or something like that. I don't know the exact details, so don't quote me on that. But yeah, that.
Nathaniel Rakich:
Fundraising is a big one. We look at how many individual contributions or how much money they've raised from individual contributions, because that can be... Obviously, it's good to have money in your campaign to spend money on ads and stuff like that, but can also be an indication of your grassroot support. We also look... there's actually a variable for scandals. If candidates have a scandal associated with them, that dings them a little bit. So, lots of things go into the soup.
Nathaniel Rakich:
And then, the final thing, in the deluxe version of our forecast, there are three different versions that people can look at, but the one that is the default that you see if you go to fivethirtyeight.com is this deluxe version. And that also incorporates the race ratings from folks like Cook, and Inside Elections, and Sabato's Crystal Ball, because again, they do sometimes see data that we don't. They also, sometimes, maybe somebody like J.R. Majewski, they know that he went to January 6th, and they know that the NRCC has basically abandoned him, and the model doesn't "know" that. So, especially in the absence of polls, that can really make a difference too.
Joe Sudbay:
It's really fascinating. It is interesting too that, when you see some of these analyses and you address it too, it is candidate quality. And the fact that we're even having a conversation in October of 2022 about the possibility that the Democrats have put the House in play, to me, it's a very exciting place to be.
Joe Sudbay:
Maybe it doesn't hold out, but kind of feels like the way I know Democratic activists, the fact that it feels like it could happen really engenders a lot of enthusiasm. And enthusiasm is a big part of what we need going into, what our side need going into these elections.
David Beard:
So we could definitely talk about specifically the 2022 predictions and our estimations all day, but I do want to touch on a couple of other topics while we have you here. One of the things that you recently wrote about was how progressives did during primary season. We just finished obviously many months long primary season where there were a lot of Democratic battles between progressives and more establishment candidates, also a lot of Republican battles that got very nasty that we won't get into now. And you found that there was a fairly poor record for progressives against incumbents, though they did have somewhat better success rate in open seat races. So what were the main takeaways from your look at the 2020 primaries?
Nathaniel Rakich:
Right. So we took a look at, I think it was six or seven different progressive groups. And it should be noted that we can't look at every progressive group every year when we do this article, we get a note from a different progressive group that we didn't analyze. It says, "What about us?" And we're sorry, we can't include everybody. And as a result, this isn't like a comprehensive analysis, but had some of the big hitters, places like Our Revolution, Justice Democrats, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, et cetera.
Nathaniel Rakich:
And we took a look at the candidates they had endorsed and whether they won or not in their primaries. And so unsurprisingly, we saw that when they tried to take down incumbents, they didn't do very well. So only one progressive defeated an incumbent this year, and that was Jamie McLeod-Skinner in Oregon. But 10 of them, 10 of those endorsed candidates lost. And so Jessica Cisneros I think is a prominent example of that.
Nathaniel Rakich:
That said, as you mentioned, progressives did have a better win rate in incumbent-less primaries, like open seats. So they won 14 out of 25 races there, which is 56%, so more than half. That said, that is a step back from 2020 when we did the same analysis and they won 67% of the open seats that they contested. And this could just be random variation, could also be, we noted in the article that there was more concerted opposition to progressives in some of these seats, particularly from AIPAC, which kind of popped up again and again spending a lot of money against progressives in states like North Carolina.
Nathaniel Rakich:
And so generally our findings this year were consistent with past years, which is that establishment aligned groups, so this year we looked at Joe, Biden who only made three endorsements, but he went two for three. We looked at AIPAC … we looked at the DCCC’s Red to Blue list; those candidates tend to win almost all the time. But progressives do win, especially in these open seat races, a decent amount of time. And when you think about their goals, they're playing the long game.
Nathaniel Rakich:
Every year, they're adding a few members to the progressive bloc in Congress and over time that will amount to something. So even if on race by race basis, they're disappointed almost as often as they are not, or I guess if you include the incumbent ones, they're disappointed more often than they're happy, they've still made some tangible progress since like 2016, 2018, which is kind of when the modern progressive movement, I would say jumped on the scene.
Joe Sudbay:
I have one what question too before we let you go. It feels like over the past few weeks, it feels like it has happened, we've seen a shift from the polling that looks at registered voters to likely voters. And I feel Mark Mellman, the pollster, wrote a post about this back in 2020 and I feel like it's going to reappear and pop up every year, every election year at around this time as people are trying to sort out what that means. So what are some of the different ways that pollsters actually create likely voter models?
Nathaniel Rakich:
Yeah, it's a great question. So there are a few different techniques. Some pollsters will just ask people, "Are you going to vote?" Other pollsters will ask people a series of questions to get at their political engagement and use the answers to those questions to build their own model for likelihood to vote. Other pollsters will literally just look at the voter file and see, did this person vote in three of the last four elections or something like that.
Nathaniel Rakich:
Basically based on the theory that if people have been habitually a strong voter, then they are, but if they didn't vote in the 2018 midterms, maybe they won't vote in 2022 or maybe they didn't vote in both 2014 and 2018 if they're old enough. So yeah, so there are a variety of techniques. They might mix and match with these as well. There's also kind of a difference between sometimes a pollster will try to assess on an individual level, is this person likely to vote? And if the answer is yes, they will count them in their likely voter sample. And if the answer is no, they won't count them.
Nathaniel Rakich:
Other pollsters do it more probabilistically. So they say, "This person we think has an 80% chance of voting and so we'll give them 80%. They'll be worth 80% of a person of a respondent in our poll" and kind of aggregate up from there. So there are a lot of different methods that pollsters use and nobody has the secret sauce. Obviously if they did, then everybody would just use that. Pollsters have been doing this obviously for a long time. Some of these really well regarded pollsters like Monmouth or Quinnipiac or Siena College, they are experts at this. I think they do a pretty good job overall.
David Beard:
So obviously we've been using likely voter models for a long time. Has there ever been any research or do you know of any research if they're actually better than registered voter models? I presume that they are just because everyone always uses them, but I don't know. I assume that someone studied this at some point, I just don't know.
Nathaniel Rakich:
Yeah, they're definitely better than registered voter polls. It's always difficult obviously to project exactly who's going to turn out. And I think especially in 2022, you might assume that the Republicans would be very enthusiastic to turn out to vote and Democrats might not be, but the Dobbs decision maybe turned that on its head and we've seen a lot of anecdotal stories about women and young people registering in big numbers and it's like, are these people going to turn out? They seem enthused, but we've been burned before by assuming that young people are going to turn out in big numbers. It's certainly tricky.
Nathaniel Rakich:
But on the flip side, the alternative, looking at registered voters, we know for a fact that not all registered voters are going to vote. We know that disproportionately certain types of voters, young people, people of color, do not vote at as high rates as other groups of voters like older people, white people, college-educated people. So if you're just looking at registered voters, you are going to get a proposed electorate that is not going to exactly match the people who are actually going to go to the polls.
Nathaniel Rakich:
And I don't know what the correct percentage of college-educated people versus Latinos versus young people, women versus men is going to be in November, but I think that the likely voter model, especially by a pollster who has lots of practice doing this, is going to get you closer to the correct answer than just looking at registered voters, and probably as close as possible. And of course, this is where I put the obligatory FiveThirtyEight line, that polls are not going to be a hundred percent accurate. You just can't expect that out of them. They are going to have this margin of error. They get pretty close, but they're not going to be precise. So just be prepared for that.
David Beard:
Absolutely. So hopefully most of our listeners are already well aware of this, but where can folks find you?
Nathaniel Rakich:
I write for FiveThirtyEight, so you can just go to fivethirtyeight.com. We are writing a lot of things these days. And then you can also follow me on Twitter @baseballot, which is the name of my old blog.
David Beard:
Great. Well, thanks for joining us. We've been talking with Nathaniel Rakich, the senior elections analyst for FiveThirtyEight.
Nathaniel Rakich:
Thanks for having me, guys.
David Beard:
That's all from us this week. Thanks to Nathaniel Rakich for joining us. The Downballot comes out every Thursday everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing thedownballot@dailykos.com. If you haven't already, please subscribe to The Downballot and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks to our producer Cara Zelaya, and editor, Tim Einenkel. We'll be back next week with a new episode.