The big boss is (almost) here: Former Gov. Roy Cooper is reportedly set to run for North Carolina's open Senate seat, and we're talking all about it on this week's episode of The Downballot podcast. Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard explain why Cooper is the Democrats' No. 1 recruit of the 2026 midterms.

We also talk with Brian Lemek, the executive director of Defend the Vote, about how his organization helps elect candidates eager to fight for democracy. Lemek tells us that it's okay for Democrats to acknowledge that the system is broken—and that doing so allows them to connect the task of fixing our democracy with voters' everyday concerns. He also flags some of his favorite candidates running this cycle, including one surprising name.

Texas Republicans already gerrymandered their maps half to death, but Donald Trump is pushing them to go even further. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, however, has proposed a tit-for-tat plan that would make the GOP pay a price, and we're exploring its potential on this week's episode of The Downballot podcast. Are Newsom's ideas legally feasible—and can he sell them to voters? A swing of as many as five House seats could depend on it.

Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also go behind the scenes to discuss what it's like to actually run in a special election with Washington state Sen. Deb Krishnadasan. She tells us all about the extremely swingy district she's defending; how the August top-two primary functions as a sort of massive poll of the November general election; and how Trump's "big beautiful bill" instantly got voters up in arms.

Zohran Mamdani's stunning upset in last month's primary is still reverberating, which is why we were eager to talk with his pollster, Jane Rayburn of Workbench Strategy, on this week's episode of The Downballot podcast to understand just how he pulled it off. Rayburn pulls back the curtain to explain how her firm captured the sentiments of a radically reshaped electorate, why Mamdani wanted a two-person race, and when she knew he could actually win. Plus, the challenges of polling a ranked-choice contest!

Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also delve into two major Republicans who announced retirements just before the Fourth of July: Thom Tillis in North Carolina and Don Bacon in Nebraska. Why are they bailing? Who has the inside track to succeed them? And what exactly is Lara Trump's job? We do our level best to answer all of these questions!

Zohran Mamdani pulled off one of the most astonishing upsets of all time on Tuesday, so we've devoted this week's entire episode of The Downballot podcast to understanding how it happened and what it all means.

Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard discuss how Mamdani drew out new voters and forged an unlikely multi-ethnic coalition through his singular emphasis on affordability—a stark contrast to Andrew Cuomo's old-school campaign (or lack thereof) and his reliance on dark money.

The Davids also look ahead to November and explain why Mamdani remains the frontrunner despite Wall Street's panic. They conclude by emphasizing the lessons Democrats should learn from the race, including the most important of all: act like a winner.

Paul Krugman is many things: a Nobel Prize-winning economist, a beloved professor, and a former New York Times columnist, among others.

But now he’s also a fellow Substacker, publishing his eponymous must-read newsletter every weekday—and a special video feature on the weekends.

So it was with the utmost pleasure that I joined his weekly video chat, along with G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers, to discuss one of my favorite topics: special elections.

At least, that’s where we started! With a fellow like Paul, I expected a wide-ranging conversation, and that’s exactly what unfolded. We not only talked about why Democrats are racking up massive overperformances in special elections, but we also explored:

* Why polls don’t look quite as strong for the Democrats—or do they?

* What might happen if Trump floods the streets with troops, L.A.-style, just before the midterms

* How legacy media is failing to meet the moment—and why independent outlets are more important than ever

And so much more. My only regret is that we stopped the recording before we chatted about our mutual love for Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” novels (and why the TV adaptation is no good at all!).

You can watch our entire discussion above, and you can also read a complete transcript below. I hope you enjoy watching this conversation as much as I enjoyed participating in it!

PAUL KRUGMAN: So hi, everyone. As regular viewers know, I try on Saturdays to have a video conversation with interesting people. And this time is going to be a little different because I'm talking with two people, David Nir and G. Elliott Morris, with at least the starting topic suggested by David, being: what can we learn from the special elections that have been taking place? But I think this will probably devolve into a general discussion of the current political scene. And it also, maybe not so unusually, is a subject of which I know nothing. So I'm going to rely on two guys who do know something responding to questions from an ignorant interlocutor.

So let's just see how this all plays out. And I'm going to actually start with David, because it was your idea that we have this conversation and talk about special elections, but I think that we want to get into some broader things. But why is now a good time to talk about special elections?

DAVID NIR: So Paul, interestingly, you were the inspiration for this conversation because recently you published a piece in which you linked to something that Elliott wrote at his Substack, Strength in Numbers, and Elliott's piece relied on work that me and my team have done at our Substack, called The Downballot.

We’ve spent many years looking closely at special elections because they can give us insight into the broader political environment because these are real elections. People are showing up to express their political preferences. And if you look at them the right way, they can actually tell you what people think, what is going on in people's minds, what does the broader political environment look like?

And at this point, in this election cycle, in Trump's second term, we've seen about 30 special elections across the country. And we know that compared to expectations, Democrats are crushing it. They are beating expectations by huge margins. On average, when we look at them collectively, they are running 16 points ahead of where we would expect a normal Democrat to run in these elections. And if these patterns hold true, that would be more than enough for Democrats to take back the House next year.

KRUGMAN: Okay. The thing about special elections, on one hand, they're real votes, and we want to talk a little bit about polling, but the good news is they’re real votes. This is not asking people what they think, which may be what they think you want them to think, or whatever. This is actual votes. But on the other hand, special elections are not a representative sample of the population. So what should we be making of that?

NIR: I think you nailed that question there. It's a really, really important one because we know that the kind of people who show up for a special election, they tend to look different than the folks who show up in a midterm election and certainly from the folks who show up in a presidential election every four years. These folks tend to be much more politically engaged, typically higher educated, typically more affluent. Despite those differences, Paul, the fascinating thing is that if we look back several decades, we see that these special election performances, again, taken in aggregate, have typically correlated very closely with House general elections every even-numbered year.

It's very interesting that there is this correlation because you might expect there not to be, but it turns out they do have predictive value, even though the electorate, like I said, tends to be better educated, more engaged than the usual midterm electorate. That said, in 2024, this normal correlation that we've seen historically, it broke apart. Democrats actually were doing pretty well in special elections, and they did poorly in the general election for the House. And of course, Republicans retain control. So the question is, will this correlation reassert itself in 2026, or is this correlation over because these electorates are too different? And I think that there are reasons to think it actually might reassert itself.

And Elliott has done some work and has some thoughts, I know, on that particular question.

KRUGMAN: So maybe this is for you to come in, Elliott. And you've also, I mean, obviously, you look at polls as well, the polls are telling a related but not quite as stark a story, as I understand it. But do you want to talk about where we are on all of that?

G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: Yeah, and I'll just start that by asking a contextual question for David. So you say that 2024, 2025 is a 16-point swing in Democrats' favor, right? Is that larger than in 2018? Is that, like, notably significant?

NIR: Yeah, it's pretty fascinating in 2017 and 2018. Over that entire cycle, we had more than 100 special elections. And in those elections, Democrats, compared to the presidential election in 2016, ran about 10 to 11 points ahead. So at this point, even though it's only June in 2025, Democrats are now running 16 points ahead. So this aggregate overperformance, that's the nerdy term we like to use, is bigger than it was in 2017-2018. And of course, we know that 2018 was a hugely successful midterm for Democrats, where they flipped 40 seats and retook control of the House.

MORRIS: Yeah. So bigger than previously. This is surprising because that's not what we see in the polls. And if you take Donald Trump's approval rating as your benchmark, for example, he's at minus 10 right now. In the adult population, he's at closer to minus seven among voters.

That's only an eight-to-nine-point swing since 2024. So, it does seem like there's a difference between these populations. Maybe the people who are turning out in the specials are, like, too Democratic than the overall population. That's my theory at least, and that's backed up by some of the voter file analysis.

There's just Republicans dropping off. And if that's the case, then it slightly exaggerates the backlash. But there's still a really large backlash in the polling right now, a minus-seven approval rating. Among voters, minus 10 among adults for Trump is like a historically large deficit for a president at this point in their term. The only one that comes close is actually Bill Clinton. Now we're in Trump's 2nd term, and in Trump's first term, of course, he was even worse.

KRUGMAN: Yeah. So Trump is slightly less unpopular if we believe the polls than he was at this point in his first term. But the special elections are basically saying that people really, really basically hate his party. None of these things are saying that Republicans are in good shape, but just how bad it is depends on what your data source is. Am I right?

MORRIS: Yeah, that's right. And it looks like Democrats are fired up and ready to go to vote out Donald Trump, to use the old adage.

NIR: As with everything else, polls, of course, come with errors. There's always a possibility that they can be wrong in one direction or another. And even a metric like special elections, when you're using it for this kind of historical analysis, also like any other thing that you measure, comes with error bars. And so they could actually be a little bit closer than you think, because if polls are slightly understating how unpopular Trump is and special elections are overstating how unpopular Trump is, maybe they actually meet in the middle.

The thing I would say is answering a poll is obviously a lot easier than casting a ballot. Someone who is reasonably warm on Donald Trump, it's easy enough for them to answer a poll, especially these days. It's often by text message or on your computer, whereas actually showing up and going to the ballot box or turning in an absentee ballot, that takes a little bit more effort. So that suggests that if the enthusiasm is with the Democratic side, that could also help explain that gap.

KRUGMAN: And also people…maybe “lie” is too strong a word. But I guess I'm allowed to use it now that I no longer work for the New York Times. One thing that struck me about one of Elliott's posts was on the question of asking people who voted for Trump, would you still vote for him now? And overwhelmingly, they say yes, except that other indicators suggest that quite a few of them would not. It's basically because people won't admit to making mistakes in the past, and that may be particularly an issue in polling right now.

MORRIS: In our polling, 86% of people who voted for Trump say they would vote for him again, which is high, but that 14% defection rate is high enough to significantly change the outcome of the election. I would think changing vote preferences is really hard. People have it as part of their identity. Of course, if you're a MAGA person, that's even more true. I would expect that 86% is probably pretty spot on, but when you aggregate that up, that's the difference between Trump winning by two and Kamala Harris winning by like four. So it's significant.

KRUGMAN: Okay. So even the polling suggests that the environment is very different right now. David, question for you. People who show up for special elections are going to be highly motivated and well informed, much more so certainly than in a presidential election. How do they compare with midterm elections? We also know there's a big difference, or has been, between midterms and presidential election years.

NIR: That is an excellent question because the midterms are almost like the spot in between the presidential years and the special elections. In particular, in 2024, that election was maybe a little bit more unusual. Midterms definitely draw out your more educated, more engaged voters. And it's become a fascinating shift during the decades that I have covered politics because it used to be that the Democratic coalition would see its turnout drop off during midterm years, during special elections, during oddly timed elections, because Democrats used to be heavily reliant on groups of voters who often would only show up every four years.

And since the Trump era, the coalitions have really shifted. And so that has seemed to favor Democrats in these lower turnout elections, including midterm elections. We certainly saw it in 2018. And to a degree, we saw it in 2022 as well, which should have been a year by historical trends that Democrats should have done poorly because they were the party in power. Joe Biden was in the White House. And yet they actually hung on pretty well in 2022. So we have seen this big shift where you have these more motivated, higher educated voters now forming a central part of the Democratic coalition, and they're showing up in midterms and especially showing up in special elections.

But you're getting at the nut of the question, Paul, which is, is the special election electorate going to look like the midterm electorate? If it does, that's incredible news for Democrats. But if it doesn't, then Republicans have a chance of holding on, especially in the House.

KRUGMAN: So you talked about highly motivated voters. This question could be for either of you, but what about just plain informed? I mean, we know that a lot of what happened in 2024 was people who really just don't follow the news much. I would imagine that even knowing that there is a special election is itself kind of a selecting variable.

MORRIS: I'll take this on education polarization. So we know two things about this, maybe three things. The first thing we know is that in 2024, if you reran the election with only people who reported watching the news more than once a month, then Kamala Harris would have won in a landslide. And that's an information thing. It's also an education thing. Those are correlated. The more educated you are, the more you pay attention to the news, and the more likely you are to vote for a Democrat.

That’s the first thing we know. The second thing we know is that's true today. In a George Mason University poll, for example, out last week, the people who report watching the news are both more educated and they were more likely to say they disapproved of Trump's response to the LA protests or his militarization of it, not the protests themselves.

And the third thing we know is that people in special elections are also more educated. So I would expect that the real-world data we're getting is more representative of that super-high engagement cohort that is better for Democrats. And to both your points, in midterm elections, we know that that higher information, higher education electorate is the one that turns out.

So if there's some sort of causality here, the information that you're taking in about the Trump administration is making you more likely to disapprove of him or vote for Democrats. That's like an extra factor, an extra boost. We should be wary that correlation is not causation, but also, we have no evidence to suggest that that isn't possible. It's totally possible. It's causal.

KRUGMAN: I think this is an Elliott question, though it could be either. We have enormously significant legislation apparently about to march through Congress. The biggest upward redistribution of income probably in US history. The “one big beautiful bill act,” which, incredibly, is the actual name of the legislation. I suspect actually aversion to tackiness is also probably something that is very much selective in election behavior. But it's actually astonishing how few people are aware, even among Democrats, of what this bill is and what's coming down the pike. Am I right?

MORRIS: Yeah, you're right, Paul. If you ask people if they’ve heard of the bill, about 75% of people said they've heard something about this. Maybe they don't know about the name. Maybe they know about Elon Musk's name for it: “the big, stupid, ugly bill.” Or maybe they just know in general that there's a budget fight. So 75%.

If you ask people then, what is in the bill, many fewer, closer to like 40% know that there's cuts to Medicaid coming, that there's a restructuring of some federal powers in the bill, and that there's other massive cuts and reorientation of the budget towards the Pentagon. We ask people, “would you rather cut social services to pay for tax extensions, which is what the bill is doing, or just run a higher deficit or not cut the taxes?” People overwhelmingly pick one of the latter two options. So there too could also be a bit of causality on the information environment here. The more you know about the bill, the less likely you are to support it because you learn about the bad things presumably in the bill.

NIR: And Paul, to your point about lack of knowledge, for people like us, of course, we're so immersed in this every single day. But your normal voter is not going to be tuning into this stuff in the way that we are, in particular because the bill keeps changing, and we don't know what the final product is going to look like. And we know that there definitely will be some changes because the Republicans are fighting amongst themselves over them.

But the campaign, the public political campaign over the bill, we're not really going to see that until next year, and Democrats will have the chance to run a lot of ads and communicate with voters about what's actually in this bill. I think that whether or not Democrats succeed in the 2026 elections will in part depend on how well they are able to expose what's in this bill, to expose the cuts to healthcare, to expose the upward redistribution of income. If they're able to make that case, then that will help power them to a strong win. And if not, then, you know, what are we doing here? Why are they floundering? It seems like it should be a layup.

KRUGMAN: So, going back a bit to 2018, it looked as if Trump's attempt to undo the Affordable Care Act really did resonate. It did turn people out, and people understood that even though he did not actually manage to pull it off, this time it looks like he actually will pull it off, and people will actually be seeing real consequences. My question, I guess, again, to either of you is, will people associate the consequences with the administration, with the Republican Congress? I mean, if you've lost your Medicaid, if you’ve just been kicked off food stamps, do you understand who did that?

NIR: Well, I think that simply by virtue of being the party in power, that is a huge problem for Republicans. And the best example, Paul, that I can offer is what we saw with inflation last year and price levels that, even though it really wasn't Biden's fault and certainly not Harris's fault, it stuck to them just because the Democrats were in power. The Democrats were in the White House. And it was probably the key reason why Kamala Harris didn't win the election. So if Kamala Harris was getting blamed for something that really wasn't her fault, that just happened on her watch, then yeah, I think that Republicans really do stand to be blamed for something that not only did happen on their watch, but is directly something that they chose to do, especially, once you add in all the campaigning that we're going to see and the fact, as Elliott's been saying, that you are going to have this more plugged in electorate, folks are going to know.

KRUGMAN: I'm going to violate my usual rule which is to try and not insert my own thoughts in these conversations, but I was really struck by what happened in Canada where the Liberal Party was headed for an absolute party annihilating defeat, largely for the same reason, there was a lot of inflation and if there's one country in the world that should understand that a lot of what happens to their economy is actually not the result of who's running their country, but who's running this behemoth just south of them, it should be Canada. And yet the Liberals were headed for absolute electoral catastrophe over inflation that was identical to inflation in the United States. But for the grace of Donald Trump, Poilievre would be the prime minister now. So this is really quite something as an illustration.

MORRIS: Yeah, and if Democrats see a 20-point increase in the polls, they're going to have a pretty historic midterm. I'd take the under, but...

KRUGMAN: I know Mark Carney from various meetings of guys in suits, and him dressed up in a hockey shirt really did not ring true to me, but I guess it worked.

NIR: But I think you make an excellent point, Paul, which is, in a democracy, voters just don't have too many levers to use when they're unhappy. And if you're unhappy and there's a party in power, again, this is the causation/correlation thing. Folks were simply unhappy with the party in power, even though they had nothing to do with the real problems that people were facing.

People are going to take the one option that they have. There's really not much else to do. And so if that happened in Canada, then I certainly would expect it to happen here in the U.S.

KRUGMAN: Elliott, if we said that the special elections and the polls are sort of trying to split the difference, what would we be looking at in the midterms?

MORRIS: Almost truly, I would imagine Democrats taking the House.

KRUGMAN: What about the Senate?

MORRIS: Well, certainly taking the House. The polls right now, at least in our poll at Strength in Numbers, is Democrats up eight in the House generic ballot. It's early and there's always error, but let's just assume that's correct. And they'd be at 14 in the special elections. So split the difference here at 10 points roughly. That's about what they got in 2018 when they won 235 seats. David can correct me on the record here, but I think they lost four seats in the Senate. So there's just a big difference there.

It's really highly dependent on the map. But again, just take it at face value. If you shift the 2024 results, 10, 12 points to the left. So it's 10 points for the Democrats. Then you get North Carolina, you get Maine. For the Senate, you could potentially pick up Ohio, depending on who runs. It doesn't look like it'll be Sherrod Brown, so I probably wouldn't bet on that one. But you don't get Florida, you don't get Texas. Those are going to be states that are really highly dependent on candidate quality. So I would say the Senate is probably a pretty tough battle, even with Democrats at plus 10. I don't know if David differs from me on that.

NIR: What I want to note about the special elections that we track at The Downballot, we're not just tracking wins and losses. We're tracking whether candidates beat expectations or fall behind expectations, and in a lot of these races, Democrats are running way, way ahead of expectations. We're seeing over performances well into the double digits, 20 points, 30 points. We had one just the other week where a Democrat overperformed by 50 points, meaning that they ran 50 points ahead of where Kamala Harris did in their same district in 2024. Of course, these are at the far end of the tail. These are the most outlier-ish kinds of results. But it does suggest that in the right environment and with, as Elliott was saying, the right kind of candidate, that you can wind up with some pretty remarkable upset elections.

Now we know that in state politics, for things like state legislature or governors, people are more likely to split their tickets. If you're a Democrat, you're more likely to vote Republican and vice versa compared to federal elections. People tend to vote much more of a straight ticket in federal elections. If you vote Republican for president, you're going to vote Republican for Senate or Congress. But given the numbers we're seeing, certainly there's a possibility, for instance, of Iowa being in play. We have seen three special elections in Iowa this year. All of them have seen 20-point overperformances by Democrats. So if Democrats can manage, say, a 13-point overperformance next year in Iowa, that could flip that seat. And there was also just chatter this week that Joni Ernst might not even run for reelection, which also gives you a sense of the GOP mood, I think.

KRUGMAN: I’ve got to say, as an election slogan, “Everybody Dies,” is not one of the best ones I’ve heard.

NIR: Really? You think?

MORRIS: Yeah. Pretty bad.

KRUGMAN: Ok. If the elections were held next week, it would probably be a Democratic blowout for the House, but what could change? I remember at this point in 2001, Democrats were feeling pretty good about their prospects in the midterms, and then this little thing called 9/11 happened. But leaving that aside, what other things that are sort of more on the radar might really change what could be happening?

MORRIS: You know, you're asking us to forecast the future. So there's the obvious caveat that anything could happen. I'll just take the empirical point. The margin of error on a poll today for a Democratic lead is like six points, right? So if we say Democrats are up eight, then they could only be up two, they could also be up 14. That's just the uncertainty today. If you add in how much the polling average can change between this point and the actual midterm, then that uncertainty interval is huge. It's closer to like 20 points.

So in 2014, for example, Democrats were up in the generic ballot at this point in the cycle. That was true in 2010 as well. It's not to say they're meaningless because they are telling us something about what's happening today, and we can use other indicators to see if that's true. But the political environment can change significantly. So, like, don't sleep on the election outcome being predetermined. Don't rest on your laurels. There's a lot of agency left for people to exercise.

NIR: One point I'd add is, I lived through that time, too, with George Bush and 9/11, and in a lot of respects, politics today are more polarized. And so I think that even if you had a dramatic episode where you might in past eras expect people to rally around the flag, for instance, like we did after 9/11, I think the effect would be a lot smaller today than it was all those years ago.

An example was under Barack Obama, when he brought Osama bin Laden to justice, he saw a bump in the polls, but nothing like what George W. Bush saw after 9/11. So I think that it's unlikely for any event to really see people cotton to Trump and cotton to the GOP. I think the GOP's downside risk is greater than their upside hopes.

KRUGMAN: This is a diversion, a technical question. It used to be that we would look at generic ballot questions and then say, “Democrats need to win by 4 points” because there were a lot of wasted votes on the Democrats' side due to mapping. But that’s maybe not as much the case now. Do I have that right? I think that things may be kind of different now.

MORRIS: Yeah, David's the map guy on The Downballot, so he'll take that, I think.

NIR: So it's a very complicated question you're asking, which has to do with the distribution of voters, and also gerrymandering, of course, plays a central role. Depending on who you ask, there are certain analyses suggesting that gerrymandering had, in a lot of respects, balanced out after 2022, after the most recent round of new maps. But we do know that Republicans got to draw many, many more districts than Democrats did. And there's also the possibility that Republicans will engage in further gerrymandering even before the 2026 elections. Because in Ohio, we know that they have to pass a new map under state law. And in Texas, there's been talk of re-gerrymandering the map in the middle of the decade.

So on that front, while maybe in certain respects more aggressive Democratic gerrymandering has helped offset some Republican gerrymandering, I think that there is definitely a risk for Democrats that Republicans move even more seats out of play by further rigging the maps.

KRUGMAN: Okay, let me now ask my other question. Basically the caricature was that inner cities were overwhelmingly Democratic and non-white, which meant huge vote margins that didn't actually matter for control of the House. This may still be true to some extent, but now you have all these rural districts where nobody will even admit to being a Democrat. And so presumably again, large amounts of wasted votes. Is that a correct picture that there's kind of a balancing out on that now?

NIR: Yeah, I think to a certain degree, because what you're talking about is that in years past, you used to have lots of these urban districts, which would be 90% Democratic. And the reddest rural districts would top out, say, in the 70 percentiles. But you do have more of these extreme ultra red rural districts where you're getting into 80 or close to 90% Republican in some of these districts. So in that sense, things have balanced out a bit.

KRUGMAN: Okay. Gerrymandering is an intervention that’s sort of meddling with the election, but more extreme stuff is clearly on all of our minds. Elliott, I was a little surprised in something you posted where you sounded a bit like me, worrying about martial law, militarization, maybe not actual, you know, shooting voters in the streets, but creating situations of perceived emergency. How much should we be concerned? Are we actually going to have a real election in 2026? That's a pretty open-ended question.

MORRIS: Big question. Are we going to have not only a real election, a fair one where everyone who wants to participate on election day can participate? It's a good question. And I think we have to acknowledge that there's a risk that it doesn't happen. And you can play this out in a lot of different ways. The reason I shared that thought is because of the deployment of troops in LA, which is a real escalation of the attempts to deprive people of their First Amendment rights there. Those are very easily mappable under the attempts to deprive people of other rights. And in this specific scenario, the president of the United States nationalizes troops that belong to the state, ostensibly, without justification. And it takes two weeks for a court to say that that's actually not a correct use of presidential power. And then it just gets reviewed anyway. And there's an even further lag on the question of whether or not the president could do that.

So if the lag we're talking about between the president breaking the law and being held accountable is weeks or months, then it's very easy for Trump to deploy National Guard to the inner—inner—city or wherever Democratic vote sinks are and try to depress turnout. And as we've seen, elections are so close that it really doesn't take much interference to tilt the outcome in the other way. To that extent, the potential unfairness here doesn't have to be that large to change the outcome of the election. And I think that's a risk you have to acknowledge if you're an honest observer of politics today.

NIR: So, Elliott, when I saw your tweet, I have to say I disagreed pretty sharply. And I want to explain why I feel that way, because when we talk about free and fair elections, I think that people often think of that as a binary, but it's really a spectrum because we've never had perfectly fair elections. No such thing exists. U.S. elections have often been very flawed with things like gerrymandering, which we were just talking about, voter suppression, and many other tactics.

And even so, the party in power is still eminently capable of losing. And I think it's really, really important to step back and draw a distinction between what Trump might want or say he wants and what Trump is actually capable of doing. And the greatest weakness of our electoral system is also its greatest strength, which is the fact that it's completely distributed and it's managed by thousands of counties across the nation. And even the most determined autocrat would really struggle to subvert elections at the level at which they're conducted. Again, thousands of county-level election offices.

Elliott, I hear what you're saying about Trump sending troops into the streets, and it would be a very scary thing. It's already a scary thing right now. But I asked myself when I saw your post about this, how would I react if that happened here in New York City, and how would other folks react? And I think it would have the potential to completely backfire. Now, of course, if you're talking about a Tiananmen-type situation, where troops are actually willing to press the trigger on their rifles, that's horrifying, and I can't even begin to contemplate what would happen then.

But if we're not talking about that, then I think you could see a situation where folks are so angry about troops in the streets that they turn out in record numbers. And I think that could wind up totally boomeranging if Trump were to try that.

KRUGMAN: I think I agree with both of you. Like Elliott, I'm terrified about interventions. On the other hand, I'm sitting here in New York, and I have the feeling that if there’s an attempt to militarize, an attempt to stir up fear in New York… Although the issue is not the New York voters, it would be the people out in Iowa seeing what they see on TV, which might be ver,y very different from the way it actually feels as you know in Los Angeles with people saying, “We're not in the middle of a riot. This is not a disaster.” Someone says, “What do you know? Are you actually there in the field?” And they’re saying, “Yeah, I live here.” There are 13 million people in greater LA, and most of them felt zero impact, but what people saw in the heartland may have been very different.

I'm probably much more of a globalist on these things; I think a lot about European examples. The thing we talk about a lot is Orban-ization, that kind of Hungary scenario of sort of a soft death of democracy. One of the things though, is that Orban has not been shooting people who oppose him. He even, for the most part, hasn’t been arresting people who oppose him. It's actually softer than what's been going on in the United States. But one thing that really happened was a lot of suppression of media. I'll give you mine in a minute, but what are your takes on how the media are handling all of this.

MORRIS: Yeah, there's some historical studies of the impact of Fox News on election results, and some of them suggest large effects and some of them don't. So I guess that's somewhat of an open question empirically, but if you just look at the agenda of Fox News and all the associated outlets in that corner over the past two weeks, if you were sitting in Iowa, to use your example, Paul, you thought LA was, like, on fire; that they were sending in troops to quell the mass destruction of property a la 1968. And that's just like an entirely different reality that they live in.

So, in Hungary, you have just the suppression of information, mainly from Orban's sort of buddies who control the media apparatus there associated with Fidesz or whatever they call themselves now. But here you have a pretty intentional changing of the reality that people are going to base their decisions on. And I just think that the potential downstream effects of that are huge in terms of elections. But also, what other actions people might take if any sort of troops in the streets situation were to happen.

And then I'll just make one final point. To the extent that our decisions in a democracy are a product of the information received, we have to acknowledge that democratic outcomes can be biased by information. We're not being perfectly rational. Maybe the election outcomes we're getting aren't what people would do or decide to do if they had the perfect information or actual information in this case. And so it's worth pondering the question of what we're actually getting from the government based on the information that's being skewed.

KRUGMAN: So, with Fox, we do have a dedicated, essentially propaganda apparatus, which reaches a lot of people. We also have mainstream media, and if you read all the way through an article (and to take a random example of the New York Times), you will get a completely truthful, accurate picture pretty much of what is going on. But you might not get that impression just reading the headline and the first paragraph. And I worry a lot about the fact, again, that so many voters are really difficult for people like us to comprehend. And I don't actually blame people. People have lives. They have children. They have jobs. But the kind of first impression matters a great deal. And I really don't feel too good about the way that's being conveyed. And I worry about that in this coming election.

MORRIS: That's a big social media problem. Yeah.

NIR: Yeah, I strongly share that worry, and I feel that there's both the question of the headline and also the frequency, because as we saw with Hillary's emails in 2016, it was just day after day after day. And you're right that most people won't read past the headline. Elliott was saying it's a social media problem, and I feel like the legacy media really struggles with this. You have a journalist, a reporter who's writing the article, and they put together that piece that gives a pretty fair and accurate summation of the entire picture. But then you have someone else coming along, slapping on a headline that's designed to generate clicks and not much more. And a lot of folks in the legacy media kind of don't accept responsibility, I think, for the fact that maybe someone is only going to read the headline. And if that's the case, then you have to be a lot more cautious in the kinds of headlines you're putting forth and really explain context as best you can with a very limited number of words. And I don't think they're doing this because they have a drive for clicks.

KRUGMAN: Yeah, I know. I also think there's a certain amount of fear factor. If you have a headline that says outright, “Trump is lying about dead people getting Social Security checks,” you're going to get a lot more blowback than if you have a sixteen-paragraph article where in paragraph thirteen you learn that this was actually a lie. And you didn't misreport it exactly, but you probably nonetheless managed to misinform people.

NIR: Well, you joked earlier, Paul, about being able to use the word “lie” now that you're no longer at the New York Times. But I think there’s a lot of truth behind it, because in a way, I feel like the independent media environment, folks like Elliott at Strength in Numbers and myself at The Downballot and you with your newsletter, Paul, it creates this distributed media network that is really hard to take down even by a determined autocrat. And Trump is extremely lazy.

And so I don't know how many people are getting their news from independent outlets like ours, but I think it's pretty robust, and building out a robust, distributed independent media network is really, really important for this moment that we're in.

KRUGMAN: And may I say that guys like you, and hopefully me, have a pretty significant indirect effect via the sort of legacy media. It's amazing how many times I see legacy media pieces that are pretty obviously based on what was on Substack or another, you know, long-form social media platform a day or two before. The only kind of crowd estimates of the No Kings Day totals that are being widely circulated are Elliott’s. But I'm seeing them all over the place.

And so I don't know how many people out in the world read your original post, how many people actually read you directly. But that number, the 4 to 6 million number, was all over the place two days later. And so that's kind of important.

But yeah. Really interesting. This is a really wild moment. I'm going to ask one more question. Polling does say that people disapprove very, very strongly of the Democrats. How should I read that? How much of that is people who disapprove of the Democrats because they don't think they're standing up enough?

MORRIS: Yeah, it's a big chunk of it. Intra-party, within-party disapproval of leaders is huge right now in a way that it wasn't necessarily true for Republicans in 2017 and 2018. Dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party within the party is just much larger. So that naturally drags down. I would say Democratic favorability would be probably, like, 20 points higher, just based off of the intra-party disagreement. So that’s big.

You could write off the number, but you also have to ask yourself, like, what do people want from their party, and are they likely to come back into the fold based on what they're getting? And I think if what they end up getting is more of the same in terms of party leadership, then that number will probably stay pretty low, and it will be troubling for them. So, I'm not writing off the number, but it isn't as comparable as it used to be. That's sort of my quick take on it.

NIR: If I could bring us full circle, Paul, and just note that, yes, those numbers are terribly troubling for Democrats, but apparently they're not enough to stop people from showing up in special elections. And based on some of Elliott's work, which you were linking to last week, we have evidence to believe that there are even some independents and Republicans who are switching sides, who are showing up in these special elections specifically to vote for Democratic candidates, despite the fact that the Democratic Party brand, according to all the polls, is in the toilet. So I wonder how meaningful those numbers really are. To me, the actual election results speak louder than the polls in this particular question.

KRUGMAN: Okay, so there's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear. But it’s big and it's a great discussion. And I'm going to bring it to a close even though we really could go on for hours, I think. But this always happens. So thank you both for participating.

MORRIS: Okay, thanks Paul.

NIR: Thanks so much.

We're diving deep into New York City's many-layered Democratic primary for mayor on this week's episode of The Downballot podcast. Polls keep showing Andrew Cuomo in the lead, but is it big enough to stop a late surge by Zohran Mamdani? Will Brad Lander's arrest by federal agents give him a last-minute jolt? And will we see any more alliances like the recent Mamdani-Lander cross-endorsement? We explore all these questions and many more.

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