On this week’s Strength In Numbers podcast, Elliott and David dig into Elliott’s newsletter piece arguing the conventional wisdom on polling error might have it backwards this cycle — that the polls could be understating Democratic support, not overstating it, as the polls did in 2020 and 2024. They break down two structural reasons why that could be happening. Then, the podcast closes with a state-by-state tour of the FiftyPlusOne election forecast that’s moved sharply toward Democrats in both chambers.

This video is free to watch, but it was not free to produce. If you value this podcast and want to help keep it going, please consider becoming a premium subscriber to Strength In Numbers. Paid subscriptions keep the show ad-free, fund the newsletter, and ensure we have the time it takes to do original data-driven analysis of politics and elections. Paying subscribers also gain the ability to send in questions during our livestreams, so you can directly shape our conversations on the podcast.

A couple of big takeaways from the conversation:

* Polling bias is not predictable from cycle to cycle. In 2022, many election forecasters ended up making worse predictions than they otherwise woudl have by adding extra support for Republicans to “unskew” the polls.

* Weighting by recalled 2024 vote could be quietly inflating support for Republicans. Pollsters increasingly weight samples to match the results of the last election, using respondents’ self-reported vote. But people can misremember or change their reported vote — if disaffected Trump voters are the ones now declining to admit they voted for him, the remaining self-identified “Trump voters” skew more MAGA than the actual 2024 coalition. Elliott’s simulations suggest this could be suppressing the Democrats’ generic-ballot margin by up to a point.

* Named-candidate polling shows Democrats running ahead of the generic ballot. A YouGov/Economist survey using actual candidate names in each district showed Democrats up 11 points among likely voters, versus 8 points on CBS’s standard generic-ballot question over the same period (also fielded by YouGov) — a gap directionally consistent with but larger than the historical average overperformance for high-quality candidates.

* The 50+1 forecast now gives Democrats a 97% chance of winning the House, up sharply from where it stood in prior weeks, and a 65% chance in the Senate, where polls have moved toward Democrats in most competitive states.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the weekly livestream on Substack. We’ll be back next week!

As a reminder, paid subscribers to Strength In Numbers get to participate in our live Q&A! If you missed our video livestream, you can watch it by clicking play on the web version of this post at gelliottmorris.com.

You can also subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app to listen on your own time. And if you do listen via one of those apps, please drop us a five-star rating and review if you feel we’ve earned it — it really helps people discover the show!

You can read the transcript of our conversation by clicking the headline of this article to take you to the web version of the podcast, then clicking the button just below the byline that looks either like a piece of paper or is labeled “Transcript,” like so:

If you’re a reader of Strength in Numbers and haven’t yet subscribed to David’s newsletter, head to the-downballot.com.

And if you’re coming from David’s site, subscribe here to get the numbers behind the news.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.gelliottmorris.com/subscribe

On this week’s Strength In Numbers podcast, Elliott and David react to the first night of “Trumpapalooza,” the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, and explain why its proponents misunderstand what low-turnout Republican voters actually want. We also dig into Trump’s promise to send every adult American a $5,000 check if the GOP keeps Congress. Plus, we walk through the standards The Downballot and FiftyPlusOne use to decide which polls are worth reporting on (and, for readers, taking seriously).

This video is free to watch, but it was not free to produce. If you value this podcast and want to help keep it going, please consider becoming a premium subscriber to Strength In Numbers. Paid subscriptions keep the show ad-free, fund the newsletter, and ensure we have the time it takes to do original data-driven analysis of politics and elections. Paying subscribers also gain the ability to send in questions during our livestreams, so you can directly shape our conversations on the podcast.

A couple of big takeaways from the conversation:

* What “Trumpapalooza” boosters get wrong about low-turnout Trump voters. According to Elliott’s analysis of 11,000 interviews from our monthly Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll this year, lower-propensity voters whom Republicans hope to activate via the convention are more anti-Trump—and are more focused on affordability—than Republicans who are already highly likely to vote in November. Even if two days of wall-to-wall Trump content were to motivate them, that might backfire on the GOP.

* Not all polls are created equal, and not all deserve to be shared. David has new advice over at The Downballot walking through which polls are worth covering, and he swaps notes with Elliott about his own rules at FiftyPlusOne. Be especially aware of “informed ballot” polls masquerading as proper poll numbers, and just say no to pollsters who amplify conspiracy theories about elections.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the weekly livestream on Substack. We’ll be back next week!

As a reminder, paid subscribers to Strength In Numbers get to participate in our live Q&A! If you missed our video livestream, you can watch it by clicking play on the web version of this post at gelliottmorris.com.

You can also subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app to listen on your own time. And if you do listen via one of those apps, please drop us a five-star rating and review if you feel we’ve earned it — it really helps people discover the show!

You can read the transcript of our conversation by clicking the headline of this article to take you to the web version of the podcast, then clicking the button just below the byline that looks either like a piece of paper or is labeled “Transcript,” like so:

If you’re a reader of Strength in Numbers and haven’t yet subscribed to David’s newsletter, head to the-downballot.com.

And if you’re coming from David’s site, subscribe here to get the numbers behind the news.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.gelliottmorris.com/subscribe

On this week’s Strength In Numbers podcast, Elliott is reunited with David (who is back from a short break to recover from knee surgery) to discuss how Trump continues to alienate voters ahead of the midterms. Polls also show more Republicans than ever are saying they regret voting for Trump in 2024 — and GOP candidates for the House and Senate are scrubbing mentions of the president from their campaign websites.

If you value this podcast and want to help keep it going, please consider becoming a premium subscriber to Strength In Numbers. Paid subscriptions keep the show ad-free, fund the newsletter, and ensure we have the time it takes to do original data-driven analysis of politics and elections. Paying subscribers also gain the ability to send in questions during our live streams, so you can directly shape the conversations we’re having on the podcast.

A couple of big takeaways from the conversation:

* A new UMass Amherst poll shows just 84% of Trump 2024 voters sticking with him in a hypothetical do-over election. That compares to 94% of Harris voters staying with Harris. Similarly, Navigator Research finds 18% of Trump’s voters say they regret their vote, chiefly over Iran, the cost of living, and corruption and abuse of power by the White House.

* 2026 is looking like an above-average reaction against the party in power. In Gallup’s latest poll, U.S. adults now lean 49% toward the Democrats and just 39% toward Republicans — the biggest gap for Democrats since the peak of the financial crisis in 2008. Trump and the Republicans have essentially speedrun George W. Bush’s entire second term in 19 months.

* Trump is picking the 20% side of every issue. From tweeting his support for data centers by saying “let Data Reign” to renaming Lake Ontario to lavishly spending on the White House ballroom, Donald Trump is constantly taking positions that are opposed by the vast majority of voters. Now Republican candidates for Congress have started distancing themselves from him. Ralph Alvarado and Andy Barr in deep-red Kentucky both scrubbed mentions of Trump from their campaign websites, and Carlos de la Cruz quietly demoted himself on his site from “Trump conservative” to “proven conservative.”

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the weekly livestream on Substack. We’ll be back next week!

As a reminder, paid subscribers to Strength In Numbers get to participate in our live Q&A! If you missed our video livestream, you can watch it by clicking play on the web version of this post at gelliottmorris.com.

You can also subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app to listen on your own time. And if you do listen via one of those apps, please drop us a five-star rating and review if you feel we’ve earned it — it really helps people discover the show!

You can read the transcript of our conversation by clicking the headline of this article to take you to the web version of the podcast, then clicking the button just below the byline that looks either like a piece of paper or is labeled “Transcript,” like so:

If you’re a reader of Strength in Numbers and haven’t yet subscribed to David’s newsletter, head to the-downballot.com.

And if you’re coming from David’s site, subscribe here to get the numbers behind the news.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.gelliottmorris.com/subscribe

On this week’s Strength In Numbers podcast, Elliott is joined by Rajiv Sethi , professor of economics at Barnard College, Columbia University, and author of the Substack Imperfect Information (currently on hiatus as he finishes a forthcoming book), for a deep dive into prediction markets. We talk about how they work, which types of markets work better than others, whether they beat statistical modelers at forecasting elections, and whether markets will soon replace the pollsters and journalists.

A couple of big takeaways from the conversation:

* Markets are well calibrated probabilistically, but are not a 1:1 substitute for statistical forecasters. When information is sparse, markets cannot provide highly accurate forecasts of future events. And they can’t provide a standardized method for understanding the weight assigned to different types of information in anticipating outcomes, which limits their use journalistically.

* But markets can be very useful when other models can’t function, such as when Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 election, and forecasters had to spend a few weeks updating their models. Markets kept producing continuous probability estimates through that uncertainty. Rajiv made the point that prediction markets were able to react to new information during the COVID-19 pandemic when epidemiological models were still getting trained.

* There is an under-studied potential bandwagon effect with the markets. Highly visible odds undoubtedly have an effect on consumers (and voters) psychologically, even if they are hard to detect. Market prices from Kalshi are now contractually embedded in CNN's election coverage — Rajiv and Elliott discussed whether that visibility could itself depress turnout for whichever side is being priced as the underdog. (If you are studying this, reach out to me!)

* No, markets aren't going to replace polls or journalism. Rajiv makes the great point that markets depend on polls, since traders seek out measurements of opinion. And we know that traders even commission their own private polls, like the French "whale" who contracted surveys from the Trafalgar Group in 2024. If public polling actually became scarcer, Rajiv expects markets would get more volatile and less accurate.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the weekly live stream on Substack, and we’ll be back next week!

As a reminder, paid subscribers to Strength In Numbers get to participate in our live Q&A! If you missed our video livestream, you can watch it by clicking play on the web version of this post at gelliottmorris.com.

You can also subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app to listen on your own time. And if you do listen via one of those apps, please drop us a five-star rating and review if you feel we’ve earned it — it really helps people discover the show!

If you value this work and want to help keep it going, please consider becoming a premium subscriber to Strength In Numbers. Paid subscriptions support this podcast, the newsletter, and the time it takes to do original data-driven analysis of politics and elections. Paying subscribers also gain the ability to send in questions during our live streams, so you can directly shape the conversations we’re having on the podcast.

You can read the transcript of our conversation by clicking the headline of this article to take you to the web version of the podcast, then clicking the button just below the byline that looks either like a piece of paper or is labeled “Transcript,” like so:

If you’re a reader of Strength in Numbers and haven’t yet subscribed to David’s newsletter, head to the-downballot.com.

And if you’re coming from David’s site, subscribe here to get the numbers behind the news.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.gelliottmorris.com/subscribe

On this week’s Strength In Numbers podcast, Elliott is joined by Mary Radcliffe, head of research at FiftyPlusOne, to dig into a truly wild week in polling. This week truly had it all: one “pollster” that turned out to be entirely fictional, a real pollster that admitted to reassigning respondents’ vote choices, and two firms that our investigation found were doing polls for campaigns but passing them off as non-partisan, public surveys. Plus, we talk about how to navigate the polling landscape given the increasingly low barrier to entry in public opinion research.

Here are the big takeaways:

* A firm called “Median Strategies” faked polls in California and Wisconsin. The firm told the LA Times it had invented its results as a “social experiment,” then scrubbed its anonymously registered website once reporters started asking for methodological details. Mary explains why FiftyPlusOne never reported on this organization’s “polls” and the screening questions she asks every pollster before she shares their numbers at 50+1.

* A pollster called The Public Sentiment Institute admitted to reassigning respondents’ vote choices to boost numbers for one candidate — who coincidentally paid for the company’s polls, which it didn’t disclose. TPSI says they “leaned” respondents who had selected voting for Jay Collins toward James Fishback — whose campaign, it turns out, had paid them about $1,500 shortly before the polls came out. Collins finished in the mid-20s, and Fishback got 10%.

* Fake polls have always been around. But it’s easier than ever to conduct surveys that are both real and unprofessional or low-quality. A firm called Research 2000 faked Daily Kos’s daily Obama approval tracker for over a year before they got caught. Now, in 2026, AI tools make it trivial for enterprising young coders to fabricate release paperwork and even topline and crosstab data — and anonymous prediction markets create an avenue for payoff. Mary says that social media accounts that collect and republish polls should only publish verified results, and link to their sources (instead of posting screenshots of polls to go viral). Better yet, just go to FiftyPlusOne.news for all your polling needs.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the weekly live stream on Substack, and we’ll be back next week!

As a reminder, paid subscribers to Strength In Numbers get to participate in our live Q&A! If you missed our video livestream, you can watch it by clicking play on the web version of this post at gelliottmorris.com.

You can also subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app to listen on your own time. And if you do listen via one of those apps, please drop us a five-star rating and review if you feel we’ve earned it — it really helps people discover the show!

If you value this work and want to help keep it going, please consider becoming a premium subscriber to Strength In Numbers. Paid subscriptions support this podcast, the newsletter, and the time it takes to do original data-driven analysis of politics and elections. Paying subscribers also gain the ability to send in questions during our live streams, so you can directly shape the conversations we’re having on the podcast.

You can read the transcript of our conversation by clicking the headline of this article to take you to the web version of the podcast, then clicking the button just below the byline that looks either like a piece of paper or is labeled “Transcript,” like so:

If you’re a reader of Strength in Numbers and haven’t yet subscribed to David’s newsletter, head to the-downballot.com.

And if you’re coming from David’s site, subscribe here to get the numbers behind the news.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.gelliottmorris.com/subscribe

On this week’s Strength In Numbers podcast, Elliott and David dig into why the Wisconsin governor’s primary polls overestimated Francesca Hong by 20 points, why the “the polls are overestimating the left” narrative falls apart pretty quickly (look at Minnesota), and why late primaries are bad for democracy (and frustrating for election forecasters).

Here are the big takeaways:

* Hong’s miss is a 90th-percentile polling miss, not proof the industry is broken. The pre-election average had her up about 20 on David Crowley, and she lost by one. In the Senate and governor primaries Elliott and Mary Radcliffe analyzed going back a decade, the average poll misses the margin between the top two by 13 points, and misses of 20-plus happen about 10% of the time. What’s genuinely unusual is the direction: in all eight of the 20-point misses in the database, the polls underestimated the leader — Tammy Duckworth by 20 in the 2016 Illinois Senate primary, Sam Brown in Nevada in 2024 — and the previous record for overestimating an eventual loser was 19 points, in the 2024 Puerto Rico governor’s race. (Lamar Alexander in 2014 and Spencer Cox were both overestimated by 15-plus and won anyway.) Evergreen reminder: polling primaries is hard.

* We should judge candidates by their absolute performance, not performance relative to the polls. If nobody had polled Wisconsin, the only available take Tuesday night would have been “wow, that was close.” Instead, polls set up a prior for everyone that Hong would win big — so when she didn’t, the election gets cast as a “disappointment for the left.” David argues for rooting our grading of candidates by their actual performance. Elliott says you could also use the fundamentals. But be consistent: you can throw out the polls as junk and trash them when they’re wrong, but then you can’t say candidates “underperformed” based on polls.

* At a D+7 national environment, Wisconsin and Minnesota are at worst lean D, and maybe likely. With a generic ballot running D+7 to D+8, Minnesota a couple points bluer than the country and Wisconsin about a point redder, a win by under five points for either Democratic candidate would be a surprise. Especially considering in Wisconsin the Republican nominee for governor, Tom Tiffany, is a Freedom Caucus member, election denier who voted against recognizing Biden’s win days after January 6, one of only 18 House members to oppose the resolution condemning QAnon, and very far right on abortion. Democrats will spend heavily making all of that central to their campaign — while Trump has, at best, a 40-42% approval rating in the state. Maybe this is bluer than people think?

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the weekly live stream on Substack, and we’ll be back next week!

As a reminder, paid subscribers to Strength In Numbers get to participate in our live Q&A!

If you missed our video livestream, you can watch it by clicking play on the web version of this post at gelliottmorris.com.

You can also subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app to listen on your own time. And if you do listen via one of those apps, please drop us a five-star rating and review if you feel we’ve earned it — it really helps people discover the show!

If you value this work and want to help keep it going, please consider becoming a premium subscriber to Strength In Numbers. Paid subscriptions support this podcast, the newsletter, and the time it takes to do original data-driven analysis of politics and elections. Paying subscribers also gain the ability to send in questions during our live streams, so you can directly shape the conversations we’re having on the podcast.

You can read the transcript of our conversation by clicking the headline of this article to take you to the web version of the podcast, then clicking the button just below the byline that looks either like a piece of paper or is labeled “Transcript,” like so:

If you’re a reader of Strength in Numbers and haven’t yet subscribed to David’s newsletter, head to the-downballot.com.

And if you’re coming from David’s site, subscribe here to get the numbers behind the news.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.gelliottmorris.com/subscribe

On this week’s Deep Dive episode of the Strength In Numbers podcast, Elliott sits down with Peter Enns — Cornell University political scientist, political methodologist, and co-founder of the polling firm Verasight — to talk through a huge new paper he has published, "How a Seemingly Innocuous and Intuitive Methodological Choice Confused a Generation of Research on Policy Responsiveness." We get into why one of the most famous papers in political science appears to be fatally flawed, and why the conventional wisdom about democratic responsiveness is outdated as a result. Democracy, Enns argues, might be working better than you think.

This is a wonky episode, but one with profound implications for anyone who cares about what the public wants and how — or if — the government responds to that.

Here are the big takeaways:

* One of the most famous results in modern political science looks like a statistical fluke. From 2004-2014, Martín Gilens and Ben Page took thousands of opinion polls and broke down preferences for public policy among rich, middle-income and poor Americans. Then they identified policies where the rich and poor disagreed, and calculated how how often either group got what it wanted. The problem is that middle and the affluent agreed about 94 percent of the time — so Gilens and Page set aside every policy where the two groups weren’t at least 10 points apart, which meant throwing out 80 to 90 percent of 2,000 policies. The way the scholars analyzed the remaining subset produced a statistical paradox called “Simpson’s Paradox,” which obscured an underlying relationship of responsiveness to the poor even when the rich wanted something different.

* The paper looks at income differences among the wrong groups. One misfire of Gilens’ approach is it pits the top 20% of earners ($150k) against the bottom. But, e.g., two public school teachers in Bakersfield make enough to land in the top 10 percent of American households — a comfortable income, but not the world of private fundraisers and super PACs that influence politics. Page and Bartels once ran a special survey of the genuinely wealthy precisely because a normal 1,000-person poll turns up no multimillionaires at all, and using it Enns shows that the top 10 percent’s opinions track the middle class far more closely than they track the very rich. But they didn’t look at policy responsiveness.

* The system responds to the public as a whole. When Enns measures how policy tracks overall public opinion, while accounting for the influence of organized interest groups, he finds Congress does respond to what Americans want, and at least as strongly as it responds to those groups. A separate 2017 reanalysis of the Gilens data by Branham, Soroka and Wlezien reached a similar place, finding something close to a coin flip when the middle class and the rich disagree. The unexciting answer may be the correct one: policy does loosely follow public opinion, and most groups (excluding the super-rich) want the same things.

* This matters because telling people their government ignores them, when it doesn’t, discourages participation. Enns concludes by saying Americans agree with each other far more than they realize, that policy does follow them when they do agree, and that the right reaction to seeing unrepresentative slices of the electorate or society get their way is to get more involved, not less.

For more of the methods details, see this blog post from Peter about his new paper, and the study link here.

If you value this work and want to help keep it going, please consider becoming a premium subscriber to Strength In Numbers. Paid subscriptions support this podcast, the newsletter, and the time it takes to do this kind of data-driven analysis of politics and elections. Paying subscribers also gain the ability to send in questions during our live streams, so you can directly shape the conversations we’re having on the podcast.

You can also subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast app to listen on your own time. And if you do listen via one of those apps, please drop us a five-star rating and review if you feel we’ve earned it — it really helps people discover the show!

A reminder that paid subscribers to Strength In Numbers get to participate in our live Q&A!

You can also read the transcript of our conversation by clicking the headline of this article to take you to the web version of the podcast, then clicking the button just below the byline that looks either like a piece of paper or is labeled “Transcript,” like so:

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.gelliottmorris.com/subscribe

On this week's Strength In Numbers podcast, Elliott and David dig into why the Michigan Senate primary polls may have missed so badly, why the electability discourse about Abdul El-Sayed misses the mark, and how the new FiftyPlusOne election forecast that gives Democrats an 87% chance in the House and a 54% chance in the Senate actually works.

Here are the big takeaways:

* Michigan’s primary polls missed by 12 points on Tuesday night. That is, in fact, better than the typical primary poll. The pre-election average had Abdul El-Sayed up about 13, but he barely skated by with just a 1-point win. When Elliott looked at Senate and governor primaries going back to 2014 earlier this year, he found the average poll was off by 13 points on the margin between the top two candidates—and about 20% of the time the candidate trailing in the polls won outright. Evergreen reminder: Polling primaries is hard!

* The likely culprit in Michigan is either late movement (the polls were stale by primary day) or differential non-response bias, not just bad demographic assumptions. One pollster who was in the field in Michigan described to me a “death by a thousand cuts” rather than one big error as the culprit. It’s possible the rural, lower-income white voters he did reach may simply have been too El-Sayed-friendly, and his Black respondents broke 65-35 for Stevens when the real split may have been closer to 70-30 or 75-25.

* The deeper problem is that primaries have fewer benchmarks of vote choice to weight to than general elections. That’s a structural problem with surveying primaries, and readers should expect more errors in the future.

* The electability debate about El-Sayed is really stupid. Across public polling of Mike Rogers against either El-Sayed or Stevens, the gap between the two is statistically indistinguishable from zero. The only way to believe Stevens was clearly stronger is to weight a single Glengariff Group survey — which has also shown the strongest numbers for Rogers of any pollster — more than everything else. That notwithstanding, when we run all the data through our forecasting model, El-Sayed holds Michigan 64% of the time with Democrats taking the Senate 55% of the time; Stevens, performing similarly, comes in at 69% for Michigan and 56% to win the chamber. Mind the uncertainty, folks.

* Democrats are in better shape now than they were in 2018. The 50+1 forecast gives them an 87% chance in the House and a median of 231 seats — four short of what they actually won in the 2018 “blue wave” — but the backtested model gave Democrats only around a 70% chance to win at this same point in that cycle. That’s because there are fewer “Lean Dem” seats the party might lose this go-around, plus district-level polling, fundamentals, and race ratings are looking more favorable for Democrats. The Senate is much closer, at 54%, with 51 Democratic seats the single most likely outcome and a 50-50 tie the runner-up.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the weekly live stream on Substack, and we’ll be back next week!

As a reminder, paid subscribers to Strength In Numbers get to participate in our live Q&A!

If you missed our video livestream, you can watch it by clicking play on the web version of this post at gelliottmorris.com.

You can also subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app to listen on your own time. And if you do listen via one of those apps, please drop us a five-star rating and review if you feel we’ve earned it — it really helps people discover the show!

If you value this work and want to help keep it going, please consider becoming a premium subscriber to Strength In Numbers. Paid subscriptions support this podcast, the newsletter, and the time it takes to do original data-driven analysis of politics and elections. Paying subscribers also gain the ability to send in questions during our live streams, so you can directly shape the conversations we’re having on the podcast.

You can read the transcript of our conversation by clicking the headline of this article to take you to the web version of the podcast, then clicking the button just below the byline that looks either like a piece of paper or is labeled “Transcript,” like so:

If you’re a reader of Strength in Numbers and haven’t yet subscribed to David’s newsletter, head to the-downballot.com.

And if you’re coming from David’s site, subscribe here to get the numbers behind the news.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.gelliottmorris.com/subscribe

On this week’s Strength In Numbers podcast — the first live episode back from Elliott’s paternity leave! — Elliott and David break down Donald Trump’s new all-time-low approval rating, what gas prices and the war in Iran have done to it, and take a look at The Downballot’s newly updated hexagonal map of all 435 congressional districts.

Here are the big takeaways:

* Trump just hit another all-time approval low. In the 50+1 polling average, his disapproval is at an all-time high of 60.8% against 36.2% approval, a net of about -25. That’s even lower than the previous low the president set the day before. Across every poll out since Friday, his net approval has fallen an average of 1.8 points in the last week, with the sharpest drops among the best pollsters. CNN’s number is as bad or worse than right after January 6th.

* Gas prices explain a lot of the collapse — and cheaper gas won’t undo it. Gas prices and Trump’s inflation approval track each other almost perfectly with a short lag, but the magnitudes on the upswing doesn’t match the downswing. Based on how a small decrease in prices correlated with Trump’s approval in mid-July, we estimate a return to $2.90 gas would still leave him around -30 to -35 on prices. New Strength In Numbers/Verasight polling finds 59% of Americans have cut back on spending, and 51% blame Trump — against 12% oil and gas companies, 12% OPEC, and 8% for Biden. Evidence suggests voters’ opinions of Trump’s economy are hardening.

* Trump’s losing on immigration and deportations now. His immigration approval slid back toward its all-time low over the past two weeks, following ICE shootings in Maine and Houston, and YouGov put him at a record low on the issue this week. Since his inauguration, when the consequences of Trump’s mass deportations agenda have made news, his numbers has fallen. Elliott says Trump is now losing on both of the pillars of his 2024 presidential campaign.

* The bull case for a Democratic wave. Democrats lead the generic ballot by six points on average. But if you add the two to two-and-a-half points midterms historically break against the president’s party by November, plus the two points likely voters have run ahead of registered voters for seven months, you get D+10. That’s not far off from where the Times (D+11), CNN (+10), and Argument/Verasight (+8) put it recently.

* The Downballot’s new congressional hex map is the best answer yet to “try to impeach this.” Daniel Donner’s cartogram gives every district five hexagons and resizes states by population while keeping their shapes. The update from David covers ten states that redrew their maps for 2026. We go through an example in Tennessee.

If you value this work and want to help keep it going, please consider becoming a premium subscriber to Strength In Numbers. Paid subscriptions support this podcast, the newsletter, and the time it takes to do original data-driven analysis of politics and elections. Paying subscribers also gain the ability to send in questions during our live streams, so you can directly shape the conversations we’re having on the podcast.

If you missed our video livestream, you can watch it by clicking play on the web version of this post at gelliottmorris.com.

You can also subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app to listen on your own time. And if you do listen via one of those apps, please drop us a five-star rating and review if you feel we’ve earned it — it really helps people discover the show!

A reminder that paid subscribers to Strength In Numbers get to participate in our live Q&A!

You can also read the transcript of our conversation by clicking the headline of this article to take you to the web version of the podcast, then clicking the button just below the byline that looks either like a piece of paper or is labeled “Transcript,” like so:

If you’re a reader of Strength in Numbers and haven’t yet subscribed to David’s newsletter, head to the-downballot.com.

And if you’re coming from David’s site, subscribe here to get the numbers behind the news.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.gelliottmorris.com/subscribe

On this week’s Deep Dive episode of the Strength In Numbers podcast, Elliott sits down with Ben Wikler, former chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, 2025 candidate for DNC chair, and author of the new book This Is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy. We have a wide-ranging conversation that includes such topics as: why no message would have saved Democrats in 2024, how the party wins back the rural voters it has been bleeding since 2008, and the one-shot window Democrats will have in 2029 to unrig American democracy.

Here are the big takeaways:

* Wisconsin is the proof of concept for unrigging a broken system. Wikler’s home state was, until recently, a “democracy desert.” In 2018, Democrats won every statewide office and 54% of the state assembly vote — and got 36% of assembly seats, flipping exactly one. Years of organizing later, the state has a Democratic governor, a pro-democracy state supreme court, and new maps under which the party that wins a majority of votes can actually win a majority of seats. As Wikler puts it, that’s how democracy is supposed to work.

* No message would have saved Democrats in 2024 — and the loss was still agonizingly close. We talk about the difference between “micro” and “macro” theories of elections. When it comes to 2024, the macro: voters in every developed democracy were furious about high prices in 2024, and every governing party lost vote share — in fact, on average, slightly more than Democrats did. A shift of roughly 115,000 votes across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — about one-tenth of 1% of ballots cast — would have made Kamala Harris president. The voters who moved were mostly passive news consumers reacting to their own cost of living, not to either campaign’s messaging. Wikler’s advice for Democrats tempted by a single-cause postmortem: don’t lose your soul. Go out into the world and find those voters and talk to them.

* Ben says the party’s brand is set by the fights it takes on. Wikler says most Americans get their news about Democrats from Republicans. One candidate quietly moderating on a hot-button issue does approximately nothing to fix its brand problem as an out-of-touch coastal machine. But big public fights present an opportunity. When Republicans tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017, every elected Democrat fought back loudly — and in 2018, voters who called health care their top issue broke overwhelmingly Democratic. Wikler puts last year’s shutdown fight over ACA funding and opposition to the gas-price-spiking Iran war in the same category: fights that show, over and over, whose side each party is what really moves the needle.

* Democrats need to show up, in person. Democrats have lost about a third of their rural voters since 2008, by Elliott’s math, and thousands of local offices. Wikler blames three forces — the collapse of local news, algorithmic feeds, and the party simply not being present — and only the third is in the party’s power to fix. As WisDems party chair Wikler championed a model whereby the state party gave grants to local volunteer-staffed county “storefronts” where party members could relate to everyday voters, in person. He says 44 of the Biden campaign’s 100 field offices grew out of these storefronts. Elliott shares some ideas for taking that program nationwide.

* Democrats will get one shot to unrig the system. Wikler argues if Democrats win power in 2028, they will have a small window to enact key reforms to unrig American democracy and give power back to the numerical majority. He wants to pass the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, reform the filibuster that currently waves through judges and tax cuts but blocks voting-rights bills and progressive priorities, expand the U.S. House and elect it proportionally from multi-member districts, add D.C. statehood, ban partisan gerrymandering nationwide, and reform a Supreme Court that would otherwise strike down all of the above.Wikler cites Strength In Numbers/Verasight polling from November 2025 in the book — asked in their own words what their ideal party would fight for, 38% of Americans gave answers that don’t fit the left-right spectrum at all. Wikler says what people want is a party that fights for everyday people and makes their lives better.

Ben’s new book, This Is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy, is out now wherever you get your books.

If you value this work and want to help keep it going, please consider becoming a premium subscriber to Strength In Numbers. Paid subscriptions support this podcast, the newsletter, and the time it takes to do this kind of data-driven analysis of politics and elections. Paying subscribers also gain the ability to send in questions during our live streams, so you can directly shape the conversations we’re having on the podcast.

You can also subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast app to listen on your own time. And if you do listen via one of those apps, please drop us a five-star rating and review if you feel we’ve earned it — it really helps people discover the show!

A reminder that paid subscribers to Strength In Numbers get to participate in our live Q&A!

You can also read the transcript of our conversation by clicking the headline of this article to take you to the web version of the podcast, then clicking the button just below the byline that looks either like a piece of paper or is labeled “Transcript,” like so:

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.gelliottmorris.com/subscribe