Nate Silver: Poll Whisperer

like burning Man for me. I think, oh, yeah, you're such a Bernie Man guy. By the way, I mean, there's been plenty to keep us busy when it comes to talking about all things political. So much has happened. I think we could change the lyrics of the September song to the November song. Brian, don't you I feel like this is your queue. Oh it's a long, long while from me to November. I was right about that. I like that it was nice Bobrado, But so much has happened. I mean, it's really hard to keep all

this straight, isn't it. Well, there's a rich history of October surprises in American politics. You go back to eight there was a bombing halt in North Vietnam, which was supposed to help then Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey. In seventy two, Henry Kissinger said pieces at hand, also in Vietnam, and that supposedly helped Nixon into The former Reagan Defense secretary was indicted, which supposedly hurt George H. W. Bush. There are a lot of examples of this. Shall answer man,

what happened in for crying out loud? What was a internal action? Sorry, of course it was scratch that you want to talk about at the McKinley ray. But but I think what's interesting about all of these October surprises, from Bush's d w I to the bin Laden tape to Hurricane Sandy, just to deploy a few more, is we're unsure about what the electoral impact is. It's very hard to prove causation, and so we really don't know. To use a phrase that's not often used by the media,

we really don't know what this means. And you know, we're gonna have to wait and see what somebody who probably has a good idea is Nate Silver he's become almost a godlike figure for political junkies. Has any Brian? He is, he is a god among geeks and I

include myself proudly in that category. Uh. He's he's invented a whole new category really of journalism in which he uses analytics and statistical models to put pulling into this big machine that he's created and hopefully push wisdom out that will give us a little bit of a better sense about where the race actually stands. And you are so excited that he's our guests on today's podcast, aren't you? Brian? I am all a flutter, even from three thousand miles away.

I need silver welcome. It is so great to have you cool, Thank you for having me, Katie. First, we have to start out with comy Gate. Yeah, how big a bombshell or how big an impact do you think this is going to have on the election? So it's a little hard to tell, which is none of a

very satisfying answer. Um, we began to detect another people who average poles begin to detect some momentum back toward Trump about a week ago, a week and a half ago or so, um, where he had had a very very bad string of events with three debates that he was judged to have lost. UM, the UH, the access Hollywood tape I'm never quite sure how to refer to

the P word tape. UM. And then all these accusations were women that he had sexually assaulted them, and it was about is a bad um a three weeks as a candic can have. UM. I'm not saying any of it isn't his fault, right, but you know, sometimes when you go from a terrible news cycle to a better new cycle, you begin to rebound just because your own base begins to come home to you. So we began to see Trump's numbers begin to go up, not by leaps and bounds, but a little bit um as you

regain Republican votes. UM. And then you had Friday when you have this FBI news another story. I'm not quite sure how to characterize it exactly, but comy, we'll call it UM. And we've seen some further tightening since then, although it's not clear whether that was already baked dinner because of of Comy. My impression is that UM. Trump had gained one or two points on Clinton over the past two weeks and maybe gained another point or so

UM over the weekend. And when you describe the tightening, Nate, just to be clear, are you talking about Hillary going down at all or is it just Trump coming up with core Republican voter. That's it's the latter. We know Trump's coming up. How much that is for publicans versus independence, Probably a mix of both. But she's in national polls she has stayed at about UM and Trump's gone from now forty one or so, so he's regained some ground on Clinton UM. But you know, forty one percent not

enough to win. For that matter, forty six percent is not quite enough. So it's kind of like, you know, if she gets another point or two out of her base gets up to forty seven, she gets to be in a pretty safe position. If she gets stuck, she's probably a favorite, but it'll be more suspense on election day.

And if she declines, then things are really competitive. And there's I guess some speculation, isn't there, that that there may be something brewing at the FBI, some kind of investigation involving Donald Trump, and the Democrats would like nothing more than have that get leaked to say we'll wait a second. They may be looking at these emails on

Anthony Wiener's device. That sounded dirty. I'm so sorry, but they're also teen at potential bad behavior on the part of Donald Trump, the Russian government and the hacking of emails. Right well, Trump creates problem by Thursday, we should know, I mean, incidentally, we should point out to the listeners that were recording this on Monday, were in the time machine, and when people hear this on Thursday, you know, we could have like three or four front page New York

Times scandals between now and that's. I mean, it had been this kind of oddly anticlimactic finish before the comy thing struck. You know, the debates kind of inted early this year, and it's been a long campaign, so I think that's part of why people jumped on it. They kind of proclaimed it to be a huge game changer, um before people have seen any evidence for really what it was or how it would move the polls. How responsible do you think the media is for jenning this up?

I know you tweeted quote. The FBI story also broke at the exact time when the media was eager for a dramatic twist slash complication in the Clinton Coast narrative. I mean, so to give a counterexample, think about Wiki leaks, and that's never really broken through and been the main story, in part because that was, um, We're all coming out at the time that Trump was making a lot of news, and by the time that Trump quieted down, Wiki leaks was old news. So I do think the timing matters

a lot. Julian was probably so pistol and if he releases in the primaries where you'd have more um, inter party warfare, and that might have been more devastating for Clinton. UM. But you know, I do have the sense that, um, look, the media has incentives to to play up how competitive the races. Trumpet had a very difficult for your weeks. They were working the rests a lot, and I do

think that, um. And by the way, is also though that you had this very exciting, devastating, impactful bulletin right and then it didn't really live up to the billing, and so people are are hesitant to adjust for that sometimes. But it is interesting Clinton decided I'm not gonna go after the media. I'm gonna go after Comey himself. If it were a Republican, they would say, oh my god, you made his guys made something out of nothing, and

you've got headline wrong on this and that. But Democrats don't attack the media in the way that Republicans often very effectively due to rile up their base. But Brian and Nate, I mean, don't you think it's so strange that there will not be any kind of resolution to this whole quote unquote crisis before the election. I mean, it's it's what they're There are hundreds of thousands of emails or thousands anyway, I guess sid and all, but a lot of those are Anthony Weiner's emails, right, Brian,

So what kind of impact I'm interested from you? Brian n Nate? Does this kind of dark cloud have hanging over Hillary Clinton's head? Are people going to dismiss it and say it's a much ado about nothing? Well, we'll see. I mean, there's been some reporting that the FBI would try to make some characterization like, oh, there's something new here or there's not right. What's too late for that? Though?

Maybe if there's day Friday, they can If they said that Monday morning or Tuesday morning, right while people are are voting, how does that affect things potentially? And by the way, um, you know, a lot of people in the country have voted. About a quarter of the vote roughly is in in swing states with early voting, their states like Nevada, where substantial numbers, maybe more than half the vote will be done before election day, and so

you know the election is already underway. Now I've heard that that is good news for Hillary Clinton in terms of the way early voting is shaping up in states like Florida. What are you sort of postulating from those early voting returns. So it's a little tricky because Democrats usually put a bigger emphasis on early voting But the two states where her numbers look good are North Carolina and Nevada. Um. North Carolina registration is by party Idiana

Nevada for that matter. UM. And so you see not necessarily the African American turnout that Obama had, but you see big support from highly educated white people, which in North Carolina you actually have quite a few of in the research triangle and Charlotte and whatnot, and they're turning out. Um, we presume for Clinton in big numbers. UM. And Nevada

is a case where it's a low turnout state. If you have a ground game the other can it does not, then that's a big advantage when we should say Republicans have a history of showing up in much larger numbers on election day and making up deficits with early voting. So it's not clear yet that there isn't gonna be a huge Trump turnout on November eight, right, Um, But it does mean that if you hear about a low turnout, usually think of Democrats want to hire turn out. Right?

It could be that if you have a lower turnout in some states on November eighth, then you know that Democrats have already banked a lot of votes there for the higher proportion of the vote, And so you know which can you wants to hear reports of higher turnouts? A little bit unclear this time around? Can I ask a stupid question? When it comes to early voting. They

don't get counted until after election day, do they? So what many states do is they'll report statistics by party I D. So we know, for example that um, something like forty thou more Democrats and Republicans have voted as of Sunday in Clark County, Nevada. That Nember might be wrong, but somewhere in that ballpark right. Um. Either way, people in Nevada get very pissed when you call it Nevada.

He said, well, well, Nate said Nevada first, and then I was like, you go, Nate, and Donald Trump says Nevada. But the only possible thing I could teach you today that you don't already know, but half my families from there, and they hate Nevada. I don't know why. Let's call the whole thing off. Brian, you know Savada and I say Nevada. The word for a person from Utah is a Utah, not a Utah. And oh I didn't know people. They both sound strange syllables. See I learned something today

from Nate. Did you know that I did not? I got us off. Let's talk about undecided voters because Brian and I talked about this and we're like, who the hell is undecided at this point in this crazy election? Could there really be people who are saying Hillary Clinton Donald Trump, which one? I love them both, right? Or are the undecided really choosing between Trump or a third party, or Hillary Clinton or staying at home? I mean, what

do we know about the pool of undecided? So we know that there are people who mostly like President Obama, but I think the country is on the wrong track, which is a weird set of circumstances. We know that people who mostly dislike both candidates, there aren't a lot of people who love their choices. Um. To me, these feel like people who might wind up staying at home

and and sitting out. UM. The only silver lining to the Clinton campaign from comy gate is that I'm sure they're pretty happy that they people feel the election is compative enough that their vote matters, because you always worry about complacency and election where there's a lot of uncertainty and there are a lot of undecided That's how Trump wins. Right. If Trump's undecideds come out and Clinton's don't, um, then he has a path. It's so much about turnout, isn't it. Um.

Some states it matters more than others. I mean, if you have early voting in a state, in some ways there's more opportunity to take advantage of it. The ground game probably matters more in a state like Pennsylvania where you know who your voters are and it's just smarrogating them to turn out. Then in a state like New Hampshire where there are a lot of swing voters. That's a persuasion state. Pennsylvania, North Carolina, these are states where Ohio,

these are states where it's a turnout state. Well, when we come back, we're going to talk about what makes Nate silver tick or analyze or I don't know what it is you do exactly, what would you say curate? I mean, yeah, I don't know, report, I guess in a weird way. And and also I want to talk to you more about polling and how reliable it is and when it's been wrong and if it could be wrong this go round. So we'll do that right after this.

So we asked, and you all very nicely answered. We asked how you're coping in these final days of this insane election cycle. Hi, Katie, this is Shelley Davy. How I've been managing to cope through this election season is to use them as teachable moments for my thirteen year old and my ten year old. There's plenty of good examples and bad examples to choose from, and with my thirteen year old in particular, we now have a new statement. If behavior is going badly, we say, don't be a

Donald Trump. And it usually stops him in his tracks. Thanks for your show. Bye Wow. Oh gosh, that's a sad commentary, isn't it, Brian? It is it is, and we hope that some Trump supporters will call in and let us know how they're teaching their children as well. Meanwhile, we have another caller. Hello. My name is Madeline ben Kane, and you asked about coping mechanisms for surviving the election. What I do is write political limericks. Here's a sample.

It's cool going to town about the election. This election is nearing its end. None to shoot. I've gone plunged round the bend. I can't handle more. Gie. If my mind's taken a dive, it needs Hillary's village to mend. Thanks very much. I've been enjoying your podcast. Take care bye bye. Quite a poet. I like limericks. That's very funny, and that's actually a nice way to let off steam. Brian, what have you been doing? Have you been doing anything

to kind of disconnect from all of this stuff? I listened to podcasts about the election to disconnect from the election generally. Nate Silver, it's always great to talk to you. Do you feel like a rock star because all my friends say, Nate Silver says, well, I've had Nate Silver. I mean, they drop your name like it's going out of style, just having funny to you. It's weird. I mean, you know, it happens once every four years, then a very small spike around the mid term before we talk

more about this crazy campaign. By the way, do you feel like that's all you can talk about? And do you wonder what you're going to start talking about on November nine? I mean, I found some Frequent Flower Award tickets to Italy And are you going to go away? Yeah, I mean not right away, because there's a lot of risk of their being after math. I mean, just think

of all the scenarios between recounts. And by the way, the senate's really close now too, and so you could have a recount in a Senate race that matters between I hope not, but civil unrest between an electoral college popular route split, which is a likelier outcome than people might think. Um, so you know, and just if Trump loses, does he concede? If Trump wins, how is the country react? I mean, yeah, but no, I mean it makes me

exhausted just thinking about it. Now. That's to dinner, and the other table near me was talking about how Maine in Nebraska they're not my friends, right, split their votes by congressional district, and so people are it's very hard to get away from the election. Um let's talk. Let's talk about you, Nate, shall we. You grew up in Michigan. What's a nice boy like you doing in a crazy business like this? And it's kind of unintentional, you know,

I covered? Um So, I went to college, got agree in economics from the University of Chicago and Chicago, got a consult go Cubs. I was, got a consulting job, got bored, started working on the side to develop a midle of the forecast how baseball players we do and write about baseball for several years, um and then figure out if people are spending all this time doing analytics on Baseball's was the time when shortly after Moneyball came out,

I want to take the same approach towards politics. And this was in early or late two thousand and seven. Um So, you had a spectacular Democratic primary, very interesting for that matter, Republican primary, and then a historic general election. Um So, it was kind of being in the right place at the right time. It's so interesting to me because you grew up with your two passions math and sports, right,

So so how did that morph into politics? I mean just because my frustration, because you've seen progress in the way sports was covered became more analytical, a little smarter. Um And you know, UM, I'm not sure that's true of political coverage. I mean, very much value good reporting, but um, but the average pundit is not particularly data driven, doesn't know that much about polling, makes a lot of

assertions without evidence. UM than two thousand eight, for example, people were like, well, Hillary is gonna win for sure in Obama, you know, too far behind. Of course that was before Iowa and Iowa UM is often more predictive the results than than national polls early in the primary race. So it's more out of frustration where it's like, I have to build this myself. I guess, Nate, where do you go from here? Are you going to continue to

be with five thirty eight? I know you're working with ESPN and ABC now you deep kind of through the New York Times over there. You dumped the New York Times, which is, well, who does that need? We're only we're only two blocks in a building they might be listening in on this, but um no, look five three D is a whole wonderful biased website and then we have thirty or thirty five journalists working for us. We cover economics, sports, politics that aren't just elections, and so we have a

robust site. I know people love our election coverage, um, but we're looking forward to getting a little bit of rest, um, to letting our non politics coverage shine. But also there are going to be consequences to this election, win or lose. They're going to persist for for many years. If you cover policial living. It's good in that sense that you're not going to be bored anytime soon. Um, but it's going to take a lot of time again regardless of

who wins, too to unwrap everything that's that's happened. You wrote a piece actually about why you got Trump so wrong. Yeah, until November December, until about a year ago, Um, we were quite skeptical. And why was that? I mean, did you just not see it coming? Or well, you know, there aren't a lot of historical examples of primaries or seven team way primaries, but look, Trump did violate um, a lot of history where there's never been anything remotely

like this, at least in my lifetime. I'm thirty eight. And if you're making forecasts, you're kind of trying to make extrapolations from history. So when something unusual happens, Um, you're liable to get that wrong. The question is still, if you kind of replayed that race a hundred times, how often would Trump when I mean, I don't know, I mean, he proved that there's a very different Republican

electorate than a lot of us thought. On the other hand, Um, he had the element of surprise where there hadn't been a candidate like him, Um, where he committed so much attention to kind of rode the momentum from the polls and made sure that he took up so much oxygen that you could never have remember the day when Um kind of brilliant, tactically right. Rubio had had some debate, I forget which one. There were so many some debate whe Rubio done really well, was getting very good buzz. Um.

It was kind of catching up to Trump. And then that's when Trump unveiled Chris Christie's endorsementyone dropped what they were doing and went and covered Trump and of course it was very theatrical. They had like flown Chris Christie out somewhere surreptitiously. Um so his sense of theater and a sense of kind of how do you cater to the twenty of people who are really interested in your product? I mean that was a very trying out to be very helpful instinct for him. But you know, it does

go against a lot of history. You guess what I'm saying is that at some point, um, the polls override the history. At some point, when you get into November December and Trump has a big lead nationally and a lade in most wing states, um or most early primary states, I should say then I think we're a little slow on the draw there, certainly. Well, and it's interesting you you assigned very specific odds or percentages to Trump's chances. You put his chances at two percent in August and December.

I think people would be really interested in kind of peeling back the curtain and learning a little bit more about how the eight machine works and why the process for assigning odds to Trump was so different from what you're doing right now. Well, I think people lose the context, and you know, I kind of think in percentages, right, you know, kind of if someone's like, what's the chance you want to get Italian food tonight or whatever? Right?

When people putting often probably maybe I don't know. Um. When um, when we put numbers some things, people assume that means it's a model, and usually it is. Right when we say that Clinton has a seventy four chance of winning, that comes from an algorithm. A program will just kind of feed data in. Obviously there's a lot of thought and how the programs put together. It's not like it has a mind of its own. Um, But you know that is the output from a computer program.

The Trump forecast were we're not and I think in the future, to be honest, we're gonna avoid putting numbers on things unless it actually is the output of a model or a forecast. And when you talk about feeding in the data, you're talking about aggregating a whole bunch of polls. Basically every poll is incorporated in the model in in some way, right, Um, And it's all automated. I mean, someone has to manually enter in the polls.

But whenever a polls entered into a database, that triggers a run of the forecast that occurs on a server and so we're not intervening in the program once it's built. Um, there can be bugs, and we fix the bugs to be honest. But um, that's why I like all they say, Oh, Nate's giving Clinton chance now in Pennsylvania. It's like, not really.

I mean, it's like a computer program that my colleagues and I designed has given her that chance based on on polls that are kind of automatically fit into the model. And then I guess that's a perfect segue though, Brian to the question about how how accurate are these polls? You know, there's been so speculation about polling today and about are they really legitimate reflections of the electorate. Uh, you know, I know the response rate for posters has

gone down. Now there's online polling, there's telephone polling. Um, there there's a lot of talk about a secret Trump vote that's not being reflected honestly in the polls because people are embarrassed to say they're supporting Donald Trump. So where do you stand on all of this? And does it worry you that the data you're using to come up with these percentages just isn't right? So the percentages account for the possible of the polls could be systematically wrong.

So again, we're recording this on on Monday. As of Monday, Clinton is ahead in the polls in more than enough states. Right. She's ahead in the polls in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, Nevada, New Hampshire, more than enough states. Right. However, Um, there's a chance of polls could be wrong, and we say there's a chance that Trump could win. Some of that is the possibility of another October surprise or November surprise.

It would be at this point, um. But it's also that the polls could turn out to be relatively far off. I mean to have a four or five point polling nous is on the high side, but not unheard of. In the Brexit vote, you had about a four point miss in two thousand people. Forget this one. Bush was favored by three or four points in the popular vote and lost the popular vote. But you know, we actually have the model that gives the best chance to Trump.

There are other people who have models that process the data in a different way that literally give him a one percent chance. When we say it's a chance, and we think those models do not account sufficiently for the possibility of a of a systematic error in the polling. And just to break this down a little bit further, when you build your model, do you assign greater weight or influence to certain polls that you think are better

than others? Because I know a lot of campaign professionals look at some public polls and say, you know, those are well done and others that they think are just crap. Yeah. UM, you know, we do weight polls based on a formula that looks at how accurate they've been historically. Plus UM a couple of methodological benchmarks. So one is are you a live collar poll that calls cell phones as well as landlines. It's still kind of the gold industry standard

practice UM. And number two is are you part of UM disclosure and transparency initiatives where the pulster is revealing substantial amounts of information about how the poll was conducted, who was called, everything else? Right. On the other hand, you know, we want to try and use all the data that we can. UM. As response rates to telephone poles decrease, online polls, we actually respond to more UM. The problem is that it's hard to get a random

sample online, So Frankly, we're happy. I think that we have the mix we have right now of telephone polls and online polls. They don't always tell the same story. The online polls have the race a little closer. Um, they also show a steadier race, though they tend not to show the swings that telephone poles do. And then why is that and why is it harder to get

a random sampling online? I don't understand that because I can call you, so it used to be probably not anymore, right, Um, But I used to could call you or your family by randomly dialing a number on the phone, right, And I know that let's say seven seven, two four or three six and then dotill last four. We know that those prefixes or suffixes work, right, right, That's how I used to make crank calls in junior high. Yeah, right, it's the same principle. But now, um, that's become much harder.

People number one don't us their phone number two. People don't necessarily have land lines to begin with. They have cell phones. The phone number, you know, I still have a a Chicago area cell phone number. I've lived in New York for for seven years. Interesting, it's just find ways around that. But you know, but so it's becoming hard to get some randomly, it's still it's easier, at least in theory. UM. Then, I mean, how kind of

randomly ping someone online? Do I have their email? I mean maybe if I'm the N s A or something I do. Right, You know, some services trying to interrupt you. Instead of showing you an AD, they'll show you a poll. But if you're perturbed by that interruption, you might just click on whatever candidate's name you see first to get through. And it's interesting. I get those sometimes, Brian, do you

when you're reading an article or you're online. I get these polls, but I always think they're crazy spam and if I open it, someone will infect my whole Gmail account or yeah, who can actually the opposite. I don't. I don't respond online polls, but I do sometimes respond to telephone posters, but I don't know. They scare me. The online poll scare me because you never know if they're legitimate or not, and what they're going to do

to your and our legitimate you know. And the key differentiator is is a poll trying to get a random and representative sample of the electorate. Um You can try and do that and still screw it up. But are you trying to do it versus a poll which is purely voluntary, right that the Drudge Report quote unquote poll or the local news station that has a quote unquote poll that people can just click from anywhere as many

times as they want. Those don't tell you anything. It So the polls that Trump sites that showed him winning all three debate we're not scientific polls. And I think a lot of people misunderstood that well. I think he's deliberately obscuring the boundary. Now the resist tightened a little bit. All of a sudden, he cites these polls that he likes, right, He's very opportunistic, although, to be honest, lots of people

are opportunistic about Oh, all of a sudden, you know. Um, I mean, we're probably with ABC News some little biased here, but ABC News Watchington Post Bowl is a very good poll, um good track record. When it went from showing a twelve point lead for Clinton to a one point lead, um Democrats all of a sudden found a lot of methodological flaws they hadn't thought about before. But that does seem kind of like a huge, huge drop in her support.

That's why you take an average, right. I mean, the key is you never take anyone poll to be the gospel truth. Right. You treat every individual polling result skeptically. And yet lo and behold, if you're able to aggregate, um several dozen polls together, you can get a pretty

accurate reading, usually on the race. And what about is Katie mentioned this theory that has a lot of sway among Trump supporters that there are missing millions of white voters whom Trump is gonna energize and bring out to the polls. I mean, look, on the one hand, we say there as a possibility of an error in either direction. Um. It could also be that UM polls are under sampling Latino voters, for example, especially those that don't speak English.

But I would say a couple of things about Trump supporters. Number one, Um, you didn't see this happen in the primaries where Trump was underestimated by people like me, but not based on the polls. The polls actually did a very good job of pegging Trump's vote. In fact, there were some states like Iowa where he was overestimated by the polls. UM. And number two, you know the notion of a shy Trump voter. I'm not sure how many Trump voters you've met, but shy is not the first

word that would come to mind. Um, not so much shy. But I think there are there there, at least people that I have met who I think are not outwardly supporting him, but would tell you privately, or tell some people privately that they were supporting him. I don't know

any of these secret Trump supporters. The Trump supporters I know are pretty loud and proud about it, but I keep hearing these stories that you know, there are Trump supporters who don't want to tell their liberal friends at dinner parties and don't want to incite a big argument, and so they don't mention it. But we'll see on election day. And you know, why is Donald Trump doing

so well among non college educated white voters? Is there anything in your sort of data other than the fact that his message is resonating and that there are a lot of people in this country who feel marginalized and disenfranchised. I mean, so to put a little perspective on this, you know, Trump isn't doing that well except relatively speaking. Right, He's only has even with his search lightly only has about forty one the vote. That's pretty low. Mitt Romney

got forty seven per cent. UM, but you know, bad number from bad number from Romney. UM. To be perfectly honest, I think the data suggests that UM, racial anxiety is strongly correlated with some types of Trump supporters. That's part of it. UM. Part of it also is that UM that he gets a lot of loyal Republicans, not all of them, but some of them to turn out for him. UM. I think part of it is that there's a certain anti elitism, and Trump has become a champion kind of

culturally of the working class. I think it has more to do with culture than economics per se. And this is a big debate in the literature. UM and culture and race and economics education. These are all blurry boundaries between those categories. UM. But certainly in the primaries of states where Trump did well are places where you historically had higher rates of anti black racism. One in the general election, isn't hyperpartisanship a huge factor? You know, Ronald

Reagan got about a quarter of the Democratic vote. It's hard to imagine anything like that happening today because we all live in our little bubbles and we get information that reinforces what we already believe. And so if you're a Republican, I think you kind of think Hillary is worse as bad as Trump is on some stuff. You

probably think, you know, based on everything you're hearing. I mean, we all get so used talking about Trump, but um, most Hillary voters are voting for Clinton because of Clinton, and most Trump voters voting for Trump because of Clinton.

So Clinton is actually the kind of key um figure in the race in in some ways, I hate to say it, but in some ways, the kind of very ill put comment Clinton made about deplorables was kind of getting in the direction of how you might go about dividing his support up if you have you know, maybe that is from people who, um, who don't like people who don't look like them. But there is a lot too that is for other reasons, and for um, for anti Clinton, for partisan reasons. There are people who think

he is a breath of fresh area. And as you said, I mean, all these things are very hard to quantify, and I imagine, Nate, I'm sure there's a lot of overlap. There's some you know, probably then diagrams all over the place that have people who fall into maybe both categories, right, absolutely, I mean, and you and you know, I mean, I

think we're learning. One of the big mistakes I think people made this year was underestimating the kind of complexity other Republican electorate, where people said, well, um, you have the aablishment lane and the evangelical lane and the libertarian lane and whatever else, right, And in fact, those voters are all kind of all over the place, right, uh, and they all have a degree of being fed up with Washington and frustrated. So you know, I mean, you know,

certainly the mood that Trump invokes. And we are getting a little subjective here, but you know, the convention speech that he delivered, um was a dark, even angry speech. I'd like to go to go out on a limb if you could nate. Um, if the election were held tomorrow instead of a week from tomorrow, what do you think is going to happen? I mean, this is why we put things in probabilities, right, because on the one hand, it's not so close, I don't think, and again we're

taking a couple days in advance. It's not so close that you can say we're not sure what the polls say. The polls say Clinton. Now it's my job trying to figure out how luckily the polls are to be accurate or not. And we think because the number of undecided voters and number of wing states in play, the disagreement in the polls, the risk of an error is higher than usual in either direction. Frankly, you know, but look Clinton's and even money, you'd be very happy to take Clinton.

We can start to debate what odds you would need to take Trump. And you're saying, this is somebody who made his money as an online poker player for a couple of years. Yes, so you're always trying to figure out wins an advantageous situation. I mean, the difference be caen this In two thousand twelves and two twelve, we spent a lot of time with the same model um saying that people are calling us race a toss up, and no, it's not true. Obama has been favored all

year long in polls of key swing states. Right this time around, people are like, are in in disbelief that Trump has a shot. But you know, there are maybe enough people in the country for Trump to win narrowly. And that's what we're talking about, right, We're talking about a narrow Clinton win, a big Clinton win, or just maybe a narrow, narrow Trump win UM involving probably him

overperforming in the Midwest, maybe even losing the popular vote nationwide. UM. But you know, Clinton is doing really well in California and Texas, for example, relative to Obama, not two states that are helpful with the electoral vote very much. If you gain a bunch of votes in California went by thirty instead of twenty, well that boosts your popular vote marchin by about a point nationally, but doesn't help you

in the electoral college at all. And any other states that we should be paying particularly close attention to that you think will be meaningful on election night, I mean, there are some fun ones. So Utah is a state where you have a third party candidate, Evan McMullan, who's popular with the Mormon community there, which is about two thirds of the electorate UM, and so he's giving Trump

a race. UM. You know, Arizona is a state where if Clinton is having a pretty good night, UM, that could be a benchmark for that becomes a really good night for her and becomes something people will think of as a landslide mandate hype outcome that, along with North Carolina are the two states Obama lost in two thousand twelve which she is most likely to flip. Um. Conversely, I mean you can have states go in either directions.

So Trump is probably a favorite in Iowa, for example. Um. And so you could have Iowa go red, Arizona go blue, Texas not go blue, but come closer, right, and Utah probably not go blue, but maybe go whatever color. And McMillan is purple in our chart. Um. And so that would be an indication of of how the electorate has begun to change. We had a very similar map two thousand, two thousand, eight twelve. This year you begin to see some new threads come into play. It won't all resolve

itself this year. Um. But maybe we are talking about the four Corners states in the future, where Arizona and Utah are more competitive. Um. And maybe we're talking about how Iowa is, like Missouri, a formerly swing state that's now our red state, for example. And aren't we really talking about the decline of democratics part among the white working class. It already happened in West Virginia, it's happening

now in Iowa and Ohio. But the rise of Democratic support among the professional, college educated class in places like Arizona and North Carolina, and you see migration patterns. I mean, I think Clinton is not going to get UM to

a winning margin in Georgia this year. It could be close, um, But with four more years of tech sector growth in the Atlanta area and growth of the African American population there and college students, then Georgia could go the way of of North Carolina, for example, and the immigration to

cities right and um. But again this doesn't play purely into Democrats hands that it does tend to even out and yeah, you're gonna see um maybe the access of competition shift from the Midwest, where the Midwest will go increasingly read um, to the south, both the Southwest and the Southeast. Well. I think the fascinating thing to cover and for you obviously need to pay attention to, is

the future of the Republican Party. I can't help but think that it's going to turn into kind of a two class, two party system, with more educated elites trending towards the Democratic Party and less educated people becoming Republicans. Is that a fair assessment, you guys? I mean clearly these things have the opportunity to be self reinforcing. Um, where the people who were fed up with Reblican Party

this year might not come back anytime soon. Especially it seems like more of a Trumpian party, and if there's a Trumpian plurality or majority than even without Trump, then

it can still control many candidates destiny. I mean, one thing we definitely learned is that the reason that much of a market for Marco Rubio type of conservatism where it's kind of um well presented but ultimately pretty conservative and kind of Reagan like Reagan reinvented, right, because the market for that you to be among voters in the suburbs, upper middle class usually, and that group has gone more and more democratic. So that's been draining away the potential

number of votes that Republicans might might win. So what brand of Republicanism works, well, we don't know. I mean, Trump, who I think wasn't really a Republican that kind of reinvented the party in his image, beat out sixteen other versions of Republicanism. The one complicating thing. Um, So we don't don't get too fixated on this neat narrative about Trump projecting the party is that you did have UM, very very few upsets in Republican Senate and gubinatorial primaries.

The establishment one plenty of those, and the GOP has a fairly strong set of candidates, which may mitigate their losses UM in the Senate for example. UM, So maybe there's some hope that Trump was truly one of a kind and that he'll go away quietly. UM, because in some ways it's if in some ways if Trump wins UM, unless he has a great first term, and some ways

of Trump wins, it's more problematic for the GOP. And I know we have to go soon ate, but but briefly before we do, what's your assessment on House and Senate control at this point? So the Senate is incredible, and that we have UM six races that are really as close to toss ups as you can get. UM. It looks like Democrats might have a slight edge in Pennsylvania, but New Hampshire, Nevada, Missouri, Indiana, North Carolina, UM are very close. And we don't say things are too close

to call just to stay out of trouble. I mean, you know, you can really find lots of polls lining up on either side of those races. But the history of this is that the key Senate races tend to break one way or the other depending on the presidential as well, and it looked like they were breaking toward Democrats. And now one week later, I mean, we have the creds as a Monday as about a six chance to

take the centup. But that was declining a little bit um as we began to see some Republicans come home, I think. And finally, what about Gary Johnson and Jill Stein? Are they just non factors? I mean they do even though their percentages have declined, Gary Johnson's in particular since the all time high at one p m, that's still I mean, do you think it's siphoning votes away from Hillary Clinton or from Donald Trump? And is it enough

to make a difference in the outcome? I mean, what you've seen is that when the candidates have surged and have good moments, right Clinton after the debates or her convention, Um Trump more recently, Um, they begun to pull voters away from the third party candidate, and once those voters go to a major party candidate, they don't go back because they don't want to wind up wasting their vote UM, and so that vote for Johnson's decline from about ten

percent to five percent, stying from about four percent to one or two percent UM. There's not much that much low they would go. But but sure, I mean, if you have Johnson with five percent of the vote UM and the margin in Pennsylvania's five points, then those are voters who potentially could make a difference at the end.

Is there any statistical analysis that would tell us if you're most likely scenario happens that Clinton wynn but a Republican House, maybe a Democratic Senate, maybe a Republican Senate, whether we'll just get more gridlock or that something different will actually occur. I mean, gridlock seems like a very safe bet um in part because I don't think you're going to have um a Democratic house. UM. I think Clinton would have had need to have had a win at her back in the last week of the campaign

instead of burning into the wind a little bit. If you have Trump, you're gonna have UM, not the traditional uh necessarily well trained bureaucrats and cabinet and everything else. I mean, so you know, this is why I say eight um. And again, you would much rather win the presidency than lose it. But whoever wins the presidency is going to probably face a difficult first two years and difficult mid term in Nate Silver, Nate, thank you, Thank you, Katie,

Thank you, Brian too, thank you. So we want to thank as always johnnah Palmer for producing the show and Jared O'Connell for engineering and mixing it. Thanks to Mark Phillips for our fantastic theme music. We'll be back next week with a very special election episode, really a post election episode, and we want to hear from you once it's over. What will you be doing to Phillip all the time you've spent obsessively following this election. Leave us

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