The Strength In Numbers Podcast with G. Elliott Morris

(This note is from Elliott). Thanks to my friend Michael Podhorzer of the Weekend Reading Substack for having me on his show to talk about politics and electoral strategy ahead of 2026.

We cover:

* Taylor Rehmet’s massive upset win in Texas’s 9th Senate District last Saturday

* How views about immigration have changed since January 2025

* Where the “median voter theorem” falls short

Plus: What independent polling can add to our understanding of elections

If you missed our livestream, you can watch it by clicking play above. You can also read the transcript from our conversation by clicking the button labeled ‘Transcript’ directly below the player.

If you’re a reader of Strength in Numbers and haven’t yet subscribed to Michael’s newsletter, head to weekendreading.net. And if you’re coming from Michael’s audience, 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

In this conversation, Elliott is joined by David Nir, publisher of The Downballot, to take stock of Donald Trump’s polling numbers as he passes one year in office. We dig into the fresh January Strength In Numbers/Verasight polling data, talk about Elliott’s new project mapping public opinion at the local level, check in on Democratic strategy regarding immigration and immigration enforcement, and Trump’s “jokes” about canceling the 2026 midterms.

We cover:

* Trump’s polling collapse. Just 40% of Americans approve of his job performance, while 58% disapprove — a net -18 rating. Nearly half the country strongly disapproves. This is not a president with any sort of mandate to lead.

* The highest-resolution map of Trump approval ever made. Using 12,000 interviews from our monthly polls, I built a sub-county-level interactive map showing Trump’s approval across the country. You can see what your neighborhood thinks of the president. (Bonus points for anyone who guesses the first- and second-most anti-Trump PUMAs in the country without looking.)

* The immigration polling myth. Pundits say immigration is Trump’s strong suit, and Democrats should avoid pushing on the issue, or their numbers will sink. This has been the dominant strategy advice in Washington since 2024. The data disagree. In the new Strength In Numbers poll, Trump’s approval on deportations is -12, while border security is +4 — a 16-point gap. We are seeing the impacts on public opinion of Americans distinguishing between securing the border and ICE raids in their communities.

* Why Trump can’t cancel the midterms. We talked through the distributed structure of U.S. elections and why — despite his authoritarian instincts and desires — President Trump cannot stop the midterms from happening in November. But he can disrupt them, and the fact that he jokes about it is disturbing enough. We are in the “tail outcomes” phase for U.S. democracy, and nobody can predict how this will end.

Plus: Democrats are still running above baseline in special elections. And more.

If you missed our livestream, you can watch it by clicking play above. You can also read the transcript from our conversation by clicking the button on the player that looks like a piece of paper, or the button labeled ‘Transcript’ right below the player.

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 audience, 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

Happy Saturday, readers,

I was delighted to sit down again with Paul Krugman this past Thursday to talk through the 2025 elections and what the results actually tell us. We cover the toplines — Democrats over-performed across Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and elsewhere — and then dig into the nitty gritty of which groups swung the most, and what it all means for 2026.

Here are a few selected topics from the conversation:

* First, the election results confirmed what the polls have been telling us for months: Trump is deeply unpopular, his policy agenda is unpopular, and when voters are forced to choose between Trump and something else, they choose something else.

* Second, the movement to Democrats was concentrated among the voters who powered Trump’s win in 2024: Latinos, Gen Z, and lower-income voters. Hispanic-heavy precincts shifted 60 points to the left. People who rank the economy as their top issue also broke decisively in the Democrats’ favor, a big reversal from 2024.

* And why did the Democrats win so big? In one word: affordability. In two words: affordability and Trump. When the economy isn’t delivering for the average voter, Americans usually respond by voting out the party that holds the White House. Trump’s unpopular agenda on immigration and tariffs likely exacerbated the swing against him, explaining a larger-than-average defeat in VA and NJ.

* We also get into why affordability — not hyper-optimizing issue positions or a radical shift to the center — is the path forward for Democrats. I look at the Strategist’s Fallacy in action, and urge people to think about politics beyond the 1-dimensional left-right ideological spectrum.

* Also, polls underestimated Democrats (a mirror image of recent cycles) by about a normal amount. This is notable because polls have tended to underestimate Republicans recently. I explain what I think went wrong.

* Finally, the results of Tuesday’s election predict a sizable Democratic edge in the 2026 House midterms, and give them a non-trivial shot at winning back the Senate (I give them a ~30-35% chance). Lots can change, of course, but the upshot for now is clear: Democrats are in the driver’s seat next year. On the core questions of economic stewardship and policy congruence with the average voter, Trump is falling short. Looking ahead, Republicans will face serious headings for Trump breaking his promises on prices.

A transcript of our interview follows. If you have any thoughts or questions while reading/watching, leave them below!

Elliott

TRANSCRIPT: (recorded 11/06/25)

Paul Krugman: Hi everyone. Paul Krugman again. I am having another conversation with G. Elliott Morris, whose “Strength in Numbers” Substack and fiftyplusone.news have become my go-tos for polling elections. We had a few results this week and I want to talk about them and then talk a bit more about the broader debate. Hi, Elliott.

G. Elliott Morris: Hi, Paul. Thanks for having me back here. I think this is a three-peat now.

Krugman: It’s a three-peat, elections and polls keep happening.

So we had a pretty startling Tuesday. Maybe before we get into more analytical stuff, why don’t you just give me some reactions. What do you think just happened?

Morris: I wrote a couple of data driven takeaways—well not a couple, seven of them—on the Substack which I can reference. Then I’ll also mention a couple things from the new data analysis. For the readers, we’re recording this on Thursday. So there’s been about a day to catch up on sleep and digest the findings.

The big thing is unsurprising, but it really bears repeating. This is an electoral repudiation of Donald Trump and an electoral verdict on his unpopularity. I have appeared on your interview show a couple of times now to say essentially that the polls show he’s the most unpopular president ever—save himself in his first term. Trump’s policy agenda is also one of the most unpopular policy agendas in American presidential history, at least since we have surveys, since 1936. In that context, it’s rather unsurprising that Democrats did so well in Tuesday’s elections. They swept all of the statewide races in Virginia, all of the New Jersey races, they picked up two utility offices in Georgia, a red state—or a purple state if you’re very optimistic there as a Democrat—which is surprising. In Pennsylvania, they hold like three partisan justices and they win a lower court race as well as statewide.

In that context, it’s rather unsurprising, but it does affirm what we’ve been seeing in other data, which as good Bayesians, is always important to us. It also gives hard data to members of Congress that might want to fight Trump on things like his tariffs, or immigration, which is very unpopular, either from the right or from the left. It gives them something to point to that’s not just survey data, which is increasingly po-pooed in Congress, as we might say.

So that’s my big takeaway. There are some smaller things which I’ll mention now. The first is it’s not just that Trump lost, it’s that he lost with voters that he supposedly had a realignment with in 2024. This is Latinos and Generation Z voters in particular. He loses with voters who say the economy is very important to them, which is the single constituency that likely propelled him to victory in 2024 in the first place. So in my article I’m putting out on Friday, I’m going to characterize this as: Trump’s losing his winning coalition; because I think that’s really what’s going on here.

The voters that put him in the White House because they wanted lower prices have said, “he’s not holding up his end of the bargain.” He’s not lowering prices. The supposed Republican ideological gains among Latinos in Generation Z who have tended to lean to the left and who, by the way, still voted for Kamala Harris despite lower margins than they did previously has evidently, evaporated. That’s really worth digesting as well.

Krugman: At one level of dispute we’ve had Trump himself insisting week after week that the polls are fake and that he’s extremely popular. And it’s basically you can argue to your blue in the face that “polling, it’s not a perfect science, but it’s meaningful.”

But there’s nothing quite like actual elections to settle that dispute. This sort of says that the polling saying that he’s unpopular and his policies are unpopular is right. But it was even a bigger Democratic sweep than expected. I was taking some heart from your polling averages, and some of the polling you’ve been sponsoring. But I was still particularly nervous a little bit about New Jersey. What came in was: the polls were wrong. The Democrats won bigger than the polls suggested they would. Talk a little bit about why you think that happened?

Morris: Interesting context here, we’ve spent the last three presidential election cycles saying, “the polls are broken,” or what have you—I haven’t said that, but other people surely have—because they’ve underestimated Republicans. Over those three cycles, presidential years 2016, 2020, 2024, the average bias at the state level was about 2.7 to 3 points, depending on how you count it, against Republicans. The error that we saw Tuesday night was about the same in the opposite direction, an underestimation of Democrats. So there’s a sort of flip flopping here of the error in the polls for different years and different levels of elections. Which is always my argument that we should use these surveys responsibly and acknowledge their uncertainty. This is a good reminder that polling error does not always go in the same direction. So that’s the first thing I’d say.

But the error itself, about two points in the Virginia governor’s race according to our average, which was closer than other averages, and I think 6 points, maybe 7 points in the New Jersey governor’s race is slightly larger than average, but not terribly so for an off-year governor’s race, the average polling error for an off-year governor’s race is about 4.5 percentage points. So we did better than average in Virginia, worse than average in New Jersey, average those together: it’s not terribly surprising that we saw a candidate beat their surveys. But the mechanism here is really interesting and will have consequences for surveys in 2026. It looks like what is happening is that pollsters who adjust their surveys so that they match the electorate of the 2024 presidential electorate, something we call “weighting by past or recalled vote,” they underestimated Democrats more than the other pollsters did.

Let me unpack. So today, polls have a response rate less than 1 percentage point, in some cases less than 1/10th of a percentage point. So the people you get are really weird, it’s terrible. The people you get to answering surveys are really, really weird. The way you account for that is to increase the weight on respondents who you think are underrepresented. Based on some benchmarks, we get really good demographic benchmarks from the census. That’s pretty easy. That problem has been solved for the better half of a century at this point, but we don’t have good benchmarks for the partisan composition of the electorate. We don’t really know how many Republicans or Democrats should be showing up in an off year election until the election happens, so pollsters have to make guesses about this. Some pollsters have said that their polls should be representative of the Kamala Harris and Donald Trump distribution of voters in the off-year election. Those people underestimated Democrats because, of course, the electorate was much friendlier to Democrats. You had a lot of Republicans not show up, and you had a lot of people change their votes from Trump and from Trump to Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey.

So the top line conclusion here for me is that pollsters should not be adjusting their samples to be representative by past vote if they’re benchmark is past presidential elections, and they’re not in a presidential election. When they do that, they will probably underestimate Democrats.

Krugman: Possibly a naive question: the past vote is based on what people say, right? I wonder whether—particularly given that there appears to have been a large swing—how many people who voted for Trump are now either not being honest or misremembering strategically because they’re feeling pretty bad about that vote?

Morris: This is kind of like how I strategically misremember my chore responsibility some time. Listen, there is a possible effect long term in polls for people to underreport voting for losers. It’s not a very large effect. The polls that are done online, they ask people who you voted for right after the election, and they can use that data over time so they adjust for this. But other pollsters don’t do that, they’re asking them like in the surveys that I helped with, that we were asking them who they voted for today. So I don’t have data to rule that out as a possibility. It’s possible people see that Donald Trump is really unpopular and they don’t want to say they voted for him last time. I’m not going to rule that out.

Krugman: Last point here. I think you’ve addressed this. There’s always the question of turnout versus persuasion, and it looks like both, but I have the impression as an amateur here that there was an unusually large amount of persuasion in the sense that people who were Trump voters last year turned out to be Democrat Mikie Sherrill voters this year. Is that right?

Morris: Yes. Also, for some context, there was an unusually large swing in favor of the Democrats in Virginia. The Democratic candidate Abigail Spanberger did about 15 or 16 percentage points better than Glenn Youngkin did in 2021. So it’s very hard to get that large of a swing just based on differential turnout, based on Republicans not showing up to vote.

That should set our expectation in the persuasion direction. We don’t have the voter file in Virginia yet, or in most of New Jersey, but we do have the voter file in some counties in New Jersey. Nate Cohn at The Times looked at this, this morning. I think he finds that the partisan composition of the electorate in the places in New Jersey that have reported who voted were about 3 percentage points more Democratic than the people who voted in 2024. The difference between Mikie Sherrill’s margin and Kamala Harris’s margin is closer to 8 percentage points. So you get 5 points of persuasion potentially here of Trump-Sheryl voters, if that’s the type of persuasion Democrats are looking at in 2026 or 2028, then they have a pretty good shot of winning the Senate, probably. That’s a pretty good margin. Just to put that in context.

Krugman: Wow. My caricature of this, and I’m sure that it’s probably just a fraction, but particularly that there were a lot of Hispanic voters who basically voted against inflation in 2024 and kind of realized that Trump is not helping on that front. Also he’s going after people who look like them and they switched over. That’s a really big deal.

Morris: My operating assumption for these voters has been that they voted against Democrats because of their performance on the economy during Biden’s election. I know you and I have talked about the effect of inflation. Again, until Tuesday, we really only had the polls to back up this assertion. The polls were showing a large shift away from Trump among Latinos. We saw the same thing on Tuesday. Union City in New Jersey is an 82% Hispanic city. Mikie Sherrill got a 70 percentage point margin there. With more turnout, more people voting, than voted in the 2024 presidential election. It was only D plus 17. We were looking at a 50 percentage point swing among Hispanics, that’s too large really to be explained by noise or turnout, and in this case we actually have more people voting. So that’s a pretty strong signal that the voters are really dissatisfied with Trump, as the exit polls also suggest, because they don’t think he’s held up his end of the bargain on economics.

Krugman: I wonder, and I don’t think the polls will tell you this, I’m just asking for your opinion. How much the whole deportations, Ice agents, grabbing-people-on-the-street thing may have weighed in on that vote. I’ll share with you an anecdote in a second.

Morris: So it’s a great question. The exit poll asked people what their number one issue was. About 50% of people said “the economy,” if you include taxes, it’s closer to 60. 11% of people said immigration. The most important issue question might suffer from a category error here. The most important issue is mostly going to be economics all the time. So we might be missing people who think that immigration is important or it influenced their vote in other ways, even if it’s not their “most important issue.” But if we’re thinking about the model that voters are using, we have to think about all the information that they’re taking in. Over the last six months, so much of this information has been images of Trump kidnapping people off the streets, including citizens—or I should say ICE kidnapping them and putting them in vans, and coverage of the polls showing that this policy is unpopular. So I have to think that that has an impact on people’s votes, on their general impression of the Trump presidency and that that has downstream consequences. Especially if, again, voters think that Trump is under delivering on the economy. What was your anecdote?

Krugman: Latino voters—I know who are an utterly unrepresentative sample—they tend to be highly educated, high income, they’re a people for whom American life has been really good. They carry passport cards around with them all the time because they have darker skin and talking to family members in Spanish they think puts them at risk. They’re not sure that even the passport card is going to be good enough. But the idea that, if you’re Latino—no matter what else—that might be a marker that you’re at risk, that’s looming quite large in their consciousness. I think that has to be a factor out there.

Morris: I mean, yes, psychologically, if you’re the type of voter who voted for Donald Trump because he said he was going to put the economy back in 2018, and you really don’t pay attention to politics at all otherwise, and now all of a sudden, you’re inundated with stories of, in many cases, your family members being taken away and the promises on the economy aren’t coming to fruition, I don’t think you’re over your skis in mapping these things.

Krugman: Any thoughts on Mamdani? I actually think that that’s probably the least important political story out there, because New York—not a critique or anything, but New York—it’s just not like America. But any thoughts on that?

Morris: I’ll say my takeaway from Mamdani’s primary campaign back in June was that this affordability message was very resonant with voters. Of course, there’s also that Andrew Cuomo has lots of problems as a person, as a candidate. So we don’t want to use the electoral result here too much.

But, my takeaways: We essentially saw the same campaign being run in New York City as we saw in Virginia and New Jersey. If you abstract away the particularities of being a mayor of New York City, you’re not going to do free buses in Virginia, for example. But that is a campaign and just focused on affordability and costs and this is what voters say is the most important thing to them. This time Democrats are able to make that argument without the ball and chain of the 2022-2023 inflation crisis dragging them down as it did in 2024.

So, I think Mamdani’s victory is another point in the case that Democrats running on affordability will outperform expectations. We get the same evidence from the other elections. The Georgia election is an election about affordability. The municipal utility district there statewide, the people they elected get to set electricity prices. And there you have candidates running 20 percentage point margin statewide, an almost 30 percentage point swing from previous elections in the Democratic direction. And that, I think, is another really strong signal in the affordability case here for Democrats.

Krugman: Interesting. I thought that you’ve been making that point, I guess others too, that aside from Mamdani being left and Spanberger and Cheryl branding themselves as “centrists”, they were all running basically, “I’m going to do something to make your life more affordable.”

Morris: There’s been some discussion over Mamdani’s alleged “pivot” to the center during his general election campaign. I just don’t think we can make that argument when the guy’s still literally calling himself a “democratic socialist”. I don’t think that that argument goes very far with the voters who aren’t paying attention to his policing policy, whether or not he’s going to keep the commissioner in charge, most people don’t know that stuff. They know what he calls himself. The general orientation of his is about prices. That’s not a progressive or a moderate issue. That’s just something people care about.

Krugman: So you’ve been involved in this mostly internet waged battle—a little bit in other media—all among commentators rather than actual political players, but I think it still matters, where there was a lot of: “the Democrats totally have to change, they screwed up, they’re too progressive, they’re out of touch with the American people.” All of which looks a little bit silly Wednesday morning, but you have not so much a critique of that assessment of the Democrats as a critique of that whole way of thinking about politics. I want to talk about that because that’s something I think about a lot, too. Tell us about the “strategist’s fallacy”.

Morris: So I call this the strategist fallacy. The fallacy is among strategists in politics who map their model of how they make decisions as voters onto the median voter. In this case, the fallacy is of using issue positions to decide who to vote for. So your strategists will look at politics, will look at candidates and say, “controlling for their party identification, their fundraising ability, their incumbency status, these candidates do better or worse because of the issue positions that they take,” or that voters will vote for them because of certain issue positions.

That might be how a strategist would operate, because they know about the issue positions of various candidates, but we know from most political science research that voters have very poor understanding of what candidates actually stand for at the issue-position level. They also have a very poor understanding of what these ideological labels: moderate, progressive, really even mean. The most famous article on this in political science is a 1964 Phil Converse essay, in which he finds basically 10% of the public can distinguish ideological labels. This is higher today, but there’s a great 2017 book that basically redoes his analysis and looks at some new evidence, by Nathan Kalmoe and Donald Kinder at University of Michigan. They find essentially the same thing. About 80% of the American public just cannot distinguish liberal and conservative issue positions. So if we’re trying to think about why candidates would lose, we’re thinking about why voters would make their decisions; it’s a fallacy for us to say that they were making their positions based off of candidates’ issue positions that they don’t know about.

Krugman: Kind of a detour, but if we look at politicians, if we look at roll call votes in Congress, then an issues and ideological positioning framework does work; that you can map politicians into an ideological space and you can map particular pieces of legislation into that ideological space. The candidate’s position does predict their votes within Congress very well, that there really is “vote view”, DW nominate (a common measure of ideological distance in Congress). Nobody has any idea what I’m talking about, but there is this stuff. This does kind of work as a member of Congress thing. But most people are not like that, most people have half lives and kids and jobs…

Morris: So the other aspect of this is, how much are people actually consuming this information about where politicians stand on individual issues? This is like a “news diets” thing. I’ve said on your show before that about 50% of the American public doesn’t consume political news in anything more than a monthly frequency, they tell us. I think that’s even an overestimate, probably. I think the people that you’re getting in surveys are the really news-oriented people, so the numbers are probably less.

The fact is, that the vast majority of the American public is not consuming the type of information that you would need to know, first off, what issue positions politicians hold and second, what the ideological labeling, the orientation of those, what those issue positions are; so it becomes increasingly hard the more you look at this and the more you build out. This is the work that I’m sort of doing all the time: the more you build out individual models of how people are going to vote, it’s increasingly hard to justify the belief that you can change who people vote for by taking different issue positions.

Krugman: At some level, there’s a free rider problem. How important is it to your individual life to follow the news? Also I think that the even semi-analytical thinking that is involved in doing political analysis is not something that most people do as that’s not what their life is about.

Morris: I think what you just said is really important. Maybe I can sharpen this criticism a little bit too. The New York Times, they wrote this big editorial essay about the value of ideological moderation, which I disagree with. They ascribe the success of Democratic candidates in 2024 to exclusively their issue positions. They don’t mention inflation as a cause of Kamala Harris’s defeat in 2020 a single time. There’s no mention of inflation in subsequent articles from The Times on this—from Ross Douthat this week, the social conservative writer—and in much of the strategist space, which is among people who are also friends with the New York Times editorial billboard, let’s put it that way. In the strategist space, there’s an abstracting away from the type of factors that they cannot control. They can’t say “Kamala Harris lost because of inflation, there’s nothing we could have done about that,” or else people won’t give the money, right? They have to sell their services based on a theory of how elections work. The cleanest theory to draw in 2024 might be: “moderates did a little bit better.” So they go out and they sell that theory to donors, to party activists. It’s a nice, really neat story. They can make graphs of it and put a bow on it and sell it really well, and it’s easier to rationalize for themselves as well.

But clean, easy solutions are not necessarily correct. What’s H. L. Mencken quote on this? “There’s plenty of solutions in life: simple, neat, and wrong.” I think that applies here.

Krugman: I hadn’t really thought about the fact of saying, “look it was basically inflation, so why do you need to pay a consultant to devise your strategy?”

Morris: The 2025 elections are the same thing. It’s just inflation, the economic environment and the message about that.

Krugman: Pointing out what Burn-Murdock at the Financial Times said, which was that 2024 was a “graveyard of incumbents,” basically incumbent parties lost everywhere. That’s an inconvenient fact. What good are the consultants as an incumbent in ‘24 if you were going to lose?

Morris: The other thing I think about is—I have some friends in the strategists space, so I don’t want to be too impolite here but—you do have to think about the incentives of your line of work in the industry. I just think in this case, the incentive is towards coming up with a very simple narrative that that you can sell someone, that can from an altruistic point of view give you something to do, give you a way to solve the problem you want to solve. That’s a good instinct. But I’m in the space of constructing really accurate models of why people make the decisions they do. And in most of these models, you just come up with very little premium on moderation, a really high degree of uncertainty, and the types of factors that drive election outcomes, it’s just not issue positions, just empirically.

Krugman: The story that says, “supply chain disruptions post-Covid led to inflation, which led to incumbents losing everywhere,” that’s a simple story. But it’s not an actionable story. It’s not a story that generates any jobs for consultants. So, yeah it actually ties back a lot with our ‘24 versus ’25. It’s not necessarily that, “Democrats did something different in ‘25.” It’s just that, they’re not the incumbents, and people are still upset about the cost of living and there are other things going on there, we think.

Morris: If I’m one of these proponents of the supposed working class realignment towards the Republican Party over the long term—an enduring majority for them–perhaps among working class voters, I’m having a pretty hard time after the 2025 elections. Because the signal we get is that this wasn’t a realignment. It was a temporary, anti-Democratic (with a capital D) partisan vote stemming from anti-incumbency bias, the type of thing that Republicans are going to have to face as they are now the incumbent presiding over an economy that does not work for working people.

Krugman: I have to say, this is a different issue. That there’s a simple fix is one thing, but the idea that selling the idea that there was a permanent realignment, that Tuesday was really bad for that.

It’s funny, when I saw you writing about the strategists fallacy, I was thinking about the old line about the pundits fallacy, which is kind of a subset of that, which is that you have a pet issue or a pet position and not only do you push for that, which is legitimate, but that you argue that that is exactly the position that politicians need to take to win elections. The slight irony there is that the concept was invented back in 2010 by Matt Yglesias, who’s been a big part of these roiling debates about moderation and Democrats and could arguably be accused of doing that himself, that he doesn’t like progressive positions within the Democratic Party and he’s saying, “so what they need to do is ditch the progressives to win elections.”

Morris: I mean, let’s think about the strategic advice from that point of view. The strategic advice from the moderation crowd was that, “you should run a campaign in 2025 against trans women playing in sports, against ‘abolish ICE’ and ‘defund the police’,” right? With the idea that voters cared about those positions. We did not see anyone running those campaigns, and yet we saw a major Democratic over-performance across the board. It just seems very obvious when you look at the polling data that you don’t really need to take the heterodox positions on the things people don’t care about. What you need to do is send a positive signal that you’re going to work on their behalf and you care about them, and that’s what the Democrats did, regardless of their ideological position.

Krugman: One of the things that I was wondering about a little bit, I saw some really odd commentary, to the effect that Spanberger’s 15 point victory in Virginia was somehow less significant than Youngkin’s 1.5 point victory four years earlier, because Spanberger didn’t open up in a new space, whereas Youngkin opened up the space of campaigning against work—roughly speaking—which was kind of odd, but also had me wondering, is there any evidence that any of these other things—that wokeness or anti wokeness, that this has had any major electoral effects one way or the other?

Morris: I guess I can buy that argument. If you think about politics on the traditional left-right scale, where Democrats need to run more on the right side to win more moderates, let’s say, but what Trump does in 2016 and what he does in 2024, is run on a different ideological spectrum, not a left-right spectrum, but an anti-system spectrum and “we care about you more, we’re going to give you a good economy” spectrum as well. Just for these purposes, we’ll call this on an up-down scale.

So I think what Democrats do is that in 2024, they appeal to the voters who might be a little bit more right leaning, but are extremely more oriented towards the anti-system pro-working class, “deliver for me on the economy” portion of this ideological space, and that’s where they will continue to run. The leverage here that they’re getting is not moving to the right, it’s moving up on the chart. I find that conclusion pretty wild. Democrats have unlocked a lot of leverage by running candidates who can appeal on an affordability message. That’s the thing that people say they care about in American politics, not social conflict.

One other thing here, the voters who cast ballots in Virginia in 2021 are some of the most engaged voters in the country. It’s the exact type of people you might expect to be moved by the anti-woke message. That itself is a spin of what happened in the 2021 campaign, which was basically a negative referendum on McAuliffe, who said that “parents shouldn’t be making decisions in schools.” That’s just like an education kitchen table issue. That should also be our part of the conversation about why Youngkin won, not just “woke”.

Krugman: I just have this general impression, and it comes back to the original people’s positioning, my guess is that the median voter—if such a thing exists—probably spends maybe 30 minutes a year thinking about trans athletes or any of these hot button social issues, except in the sense that they have some general sense of whether the candidates are on their side, it’s probably just no big deal.

Morris: The data here from Virginia, I’ll mention two things. First, the survey data from before the election showed that the Democratic candidate, Abigail Spanberger, was the one who had the advantage on the very issues that people say Democrats do poorly on because they’re “too woke,” in the case of whether or not trans students should participate in women’s or female sports, in this case, Abigail Spanberger had like a 16 percentage point lead over her opponent. So it’s no mystery why she won in the first place if she’s leading on those issues. But again, what would that “anti-woke” Democratic Party strategic advice have said about Abigail? Spanberger said herself, she was “going to lose because of all these ads that the Republican candidate was running against her on trans issues,” in fact, that advice was sort of false. The conclusions from that are wrong. She wins in part because of the advantage that she had on this issue, which had some salience, but not a whole lot.

The second data point I was going to mention was the intensity of the ads from the Republican Party against Abigail Spanberger. It was entirely about her, about the Democratic Party’s affiliation with this sort of “woke crowd” arguing for “trans women to participate in female sports in schools,” which no one’s arguing for, and the ads just completely fell apart. She loses by 15 points because of a bad economic message in an incumbent president from her party, probably.

Krugman: What struck me is how heavily a lot of Republicans are leaning into what they perceive as “social anti-woke” stuff. I don’t know whether it’s that they have their own bad consultants or just that’s who they are.

I’ve been, for obvious reasons, looking up SNAP food stamp data. At the top of the data page for SNAP, which is actually maintained by the Department of Agriculture, is a banner blaming Democrats for the shutdown and saying that instead, “Democrats want to pay for sex change operations for students,” which aside from being false and aside from being totally inappropriate on our government data page, I can’t imagine who they think is even going to look up supplemental nutrition enrollment data and is going to be moved by that kind of banner.

Morris: That is a complete bastardization of the government’s role in providing data to people. In terms of the data, I just keep coming back to this massive change in the voting behavior of people who say the economy is important to them. Trump won that group by 63 percentage points in 2024 and Democrats just won them by 30 points. There’s about a 90 percentage point swing here.

Krugman: Oh my God.

Morris: Just look at that. We don’t need to really do any more narrative about this election, right? Just look at that number. That’s the whole story here. The same is true for 2024, people are just reading way too much into their pet issues or what data might give them something to sell as a campaign consultant.

Krugman: Maybe just to conclude by talking about that, because that reversal on the economy, if there’s something that really puzzles me it is just how sharp that was. I was surprised in 2024 that we had a bout of inflation, but the extent to which people appear to believe Trump’s promises that he could bring prices down kind of shocked me. Then the sheer violence of the snapback on that, we’re—whatever it is—ten months in, and the Trump economy has certainly not been as promised, but it’s not hyperinflation and it’s not a depression. Do you have a theory about why people got so disillusioned so fast on the economy issue specifically?

Morris: I think the framing might be a little off. I think they were always disillusioned. Bringing some of my priors here too—I’m a young person—lots of people my age are having a lot of trouble with economic mobility, social mobility as well. Most people my age don’t think they’ll ever own a house, for example. The idea of the American Dream is not present even for the elite educated in my group. So, that itself I think sets us up for an anti-incumbent sentiment. This is what I’ve been writing about the economy.

People are looking at this as a Dem. vs Rep. issue and to some extent, they can do that. The Gallup polling did show Republicans with a big advantage on the economy, I think a 14 percentage point lead on which party adults trusted to handle the economy. That has evaporated. It’s 4 or 5 points in the Democratic direction now. But that masks just a long term anti-incumbent sentiment among people who say the economy is getting worse. That percentage, 53% of the public, has said on average that the economy is getting worse since 2000, since the pandemic. You can adjust for a little bit of movement around the elections when partisans change how they’re feeling. In 2021, there was a bump among Democrats, and in 2024, there was a bump among Republicans in the percent of people who said that the economy was doing better. But within two months it had trended back toward that long term, pessimistic direction and pessimism is just bad for the incumbent. It’s not bad for the Democrats. It’s not bad for the Republicans. It’s just bad for whoever is in charge. I guess if I was Stephen Miller—the people in the Trump campaign right now—that’s the number I’d be looking at to know what 2026 and 2028 is going to look like: “what percent of the people say the economy is getting worse?” If that number is more than 25-30 points, you’re basically going to lose. There’s no way around that.

Krugman: Yeah. Like I said, it’s not a great economy. It’s not the hot economy that Trump boasts about, but the extent of the pessimism is really quite remarkable. I say that as somebody who’s obviously not at all happy with Trump, but I spent a lot of time arguing about the vibecession and trying to understand why people were pretty negative on what I thought was objectively a pretty decent economy in the later Biden years.

But the vibecession persists now, and to a degree that the consumer sentiment numbers look like the depths of the financial crisis. The economy has its problems, but it doesn’t look like that.

Morris: Right. I hadn’t even compared it to 2009. In 2022, the Inflation crisis itself had lower consumer sentiment numbers than the financial crisis, if I remember correctly. Trump’s number on handling inflation now is basically 30 points underwater. That’s worse than Biden’s numbers were during the depths of the 2022 inflation crisis. Yes, the indicators aren’t as bad as they were then. But you know what we’ve had, Paul, is a president, basically every day, boasting about his tariff policy and making single handed decisions about the trajectory of the global economy. You can’t blame people for a bit of a vibecession there, despite the objective economic data.

Krugman: That’s right. Consumer expectations of inflation following his tariff announcements. I’m anti-tariffs and I think they’re bad and I think they’re inflationary. But the consumer expectations deteriorated far more than crunching the economic numbers say they should have. But I guess that’s the point, he’s highlighting it.

The last issue. So we’re going to have, we think, midterm elections next year. There has been the issue, which is that Trump is wildly unpopular. His policies are wildly unpopular. Democrats have an edge in the generic ballot polls, but it’s fairly modest. Do we believe that? I think you said that the results in Virginia, if you use them to extrapolate, would be at like a 8 or 9 point Democratic advantage, whereas the polls are saying more like three. What do you think is going to happen in the midterms?

Morris: I’ll make an early prediction, if you’re going to force my hand, Paul. So there’s a couple of things working in the Democrats corner here. The first is that there’s a long term trajectory in American politics of the party in the White House not only losing in the midterms, but also losing ground in public opinion over the course of that term. We actually expect the Democrats are plus three right now in the generic ballot. The long term trajectory suggests that they, as the party out of power, would gain about five points in the polls between today, and next November. And that puts them at about plus eight, plus nine. That is maybe coincidentally or maybe not the same projection you would make about how the House popular vote would break down next year, based on the swing that Abigail Spanberger saw from the last Virginia governor’s race. It was 15 points, we should expect a slightly smaller swing from the last House election nationwide. So the Virginia swing does tend to be a bit of a reliable bellwether in our nationalized, polarized, political environment.

I guess I should caveat for your smart readers, we only have five years of electoral data there, so it’s not an ironclad prediction, but the fact that these numbers are the same and that they’re pointing in the same direction should be a source of optimism for Democrats. I’m happy to make this projection because I think it’s relatively secure. Democrats are very likely to take the House, conditional on one thing, which is the Voting Rights Act Section two staying in place. If the Supreme Court got section two of the Voting Rights Act, then southern states can very easily gerrymander Democrats out of their urban seats in states like Tennessee and Alabama. But let’s not get to that [future] point too much. I’m relatively confident Democrats will take the House. If the swing against Republicans is replicated at the state level, then Democrats would also have a potentially good shot at taking back the Senate as well. I mean, I would put that at maybe 28-29% chance at the highest, but that’s a lot higher than it was a week ago, and it’s a lot higher than zero.

Krugman: Wow. So it could be really interesting. Trump may have a difficult couple of years before he runs for his third term. Anyway, the crazy environment we’re living in.

So, revelatory week, the world looks quite different from the way it did Monday.

Morris: Well, it does, but the signal that we’ve got really affirms what I think we believe in and what you spend a lot of time—you and I both spent a lot of time—writing about, which is: the president’s unpopular, he’s lost ground on the things that people care about most. So while the Democratic brand is unpopular, when people are forced to make comparisons between what the Democrats are offering and the Republicans are offering, most of the time they’re picking the Democrats, and when their economic security is the number one thing and Trump is threatening that with 100% tariffs on China because he wants to, voters aren’t going to vote for him. So, I think in some sense the people in the camp of the polls over the last six months have actually been proven right by the election result.

Krugman: Okay. That’s a good place to end, relatively, and if you have my political orientation—an upbeat place to end. Thanks so much for talking with me.

Morris: Well, thanks for having me on again Paul. This was a good conversation.

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Readers

Ryan Lizza, the independent journalist formerly of CNN and POLITICO, asked me to do an interview with him on Friday about my new column on the outcome of Tuesday’s elections. In this conversation I make several bold claims, such as:

* Trump is unpopular and that’s why Republicans lost on Tuesday

* If Trump continues to be unpopular, Republicans will struggle in the 2026 midterms

* Realignments are realignments by definition only if they stick

* People read way too much into narrow debates about ideology and issue positions after the 2024 election, blinding them to trends that would have helped predict 2025 (and 2026/28)

* Anti-incumbent sentiment is currently the driving force in American politics

* Democrats should think about politics not as happening on a 1-dimensional left-right ideological spectrum, but a cartesian plane with a vertical pro/anti-system axis too

I also reference data from my Tuesday column.

Have a nice weekend!

Elliott

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State of play + recent events

Two weeks ago, if you had asked me who was going to win the elections in Virginia this November, I would have confidently said Democrats are likely to sweep races for Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, and expand their majority in the House of Delegates. The state usually votes against the party of the president, and Democrats are up big in the polls. Easy math, right?

Well, things might not be so easy now. Recent events have shaken up state politics, and a sweep is now in doubt.

Notably, last week, text messages from 2022 surfaced showing Jay Jones (the Democratic candidate for attorney general) “joking” about shooting the then–Speaker of the House, Todd Gilbert: “three people, two bullets. gilbert, hitler, pol pot,” Jones wrote. “gilbert gets two bullets in the head.”

Political bettors gave Jones a 92% chance of winning two weeks ago, but now put the odds at 50-50. And despite an apology from Jones and denouncement by Abigali Spanberger, the Democratic candidate for governor, the messages were a big topic of the debate between her and Republican nominee Winsome Earle-Sears on Thursday night, Oct. 9. The smart money still has Spanberger as an overwhelming favorite.

Given the national conversation about political violence right now, the issue has staying power. President Donald Trump has called on Jay Jones to drop out of the race.

Do scandals matter in our polarized politics?

But how much does this really matter? Do Democrats simply have an indomitable turnout advantage in off-year elections now? Will the AG race be decided by “fundamentals” like Trump’s approval and the state of the economy? (Unemployment in Virginia has grown for 7 months in a row.)

To make sense of all of this, I asked my friend and Virginia politics expert Chaz Nuttycombe to come on a live podcast episode for Strength In Numbers recorded Friday afternoon, Oct. 10. Chaz is an election forecaster and the founder of State Navigate, a non-profit devoted to sharing data about state legislatures (think roll call votes, district demographics, campaign finance — that kind of stuff). He’s a knowledgeable voice on Virginia politics with a good track record.

Chaz and I get into the nitty-gritty of the races and balance the predictors for next month’s elections. We also talk about what the outcome could mean for Trump and 2026.

I hope you enjoy our conversation above. Thanks to Chaz for coming! Share and subscribe if you want to see more conversations like this one.

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I joined my friend and ex-538’er Perry Bacon Jr and Amanda Litman, the founder of Run For Something, for a conversation on politics in 2025 and what the Democrats need to do to rebuild the party post-Trump.

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Here’s a quick Friday afternoon post.

Ryan Lizza (and his cute new puppy) interviewed me today about our new Strength In Numbers poll this week — and about all the other great work the community here is both supporting and, increasingly, participating in.

We talk about Trump, the LA and No Kings Day protests, immigration, Democratic strategy, polling in the age of AI, and more.

Have a happy weekend!

Elliott

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Dear readers,

In case you missed it, Mike Podhorzer and I did a video conversation together on June 2. We talked about:

* My new piece on Trump’s popularity

* How the media uses polling

* Why it pays to approach public opinion with nuance and uncertainty

* Why traditional ad-supported media is not set up to incentivize factual discourse when it conflicts with values of partisan fairness;

* and more

Mike and I have known each other for the better part of a decade now. At the end, I ask him about a big theory he has talked and written about for most of the time I’ve known him. We touch a bit on this question: Are Democrats just doomed in the Senate?

You can watch a recording of the conversation above. Please share with your friends and family.

Elliott

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I was very kindly joined by David Nir of The Downballot on Tuesday to talk about the (successful, IMO!) launch of Strength In Numbers this week, and give a sneak peek at our first poll publishing tomorrow (Wednesday, May 14).

The first few minutes will be familiar to readers because we are giving a wider audience on the Substack App the low-down on what we do here at Strength In Numbers. But the rest will be fresh for you.

We talk about:

* Why I think data-driven news is more necessary now than ever

* Incentives for and against accuracy in political news coverage

* How to improve journalism about polling

* Why it matters that Donald Trump is unpopular

* What’s in store for the first Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll coming out tomorrow…

To watch the video from this live conversation, click the play button above.

And if you haven’t yet subscribed to The Downballot, you can sign up below:

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This is just a quick post to draw your attention to two things:

First, I’ve just uploaded an initial release of my index of economic growth to the Strength In Numbers data portal. Trump’s approval rating — now at net -6 — is also updated there. I plan to make revisions to the model powering the economic index, which I’ve released publicly online, and to very soon incorporate it into a Cost Of Ruling Index that captures both political and economic conditions. Stay tuned for that.

And second, I just wrapped up a live Substack conversation with Chris Cillizza, formerly of CNN, where we talked about polling, Trump, and how to cover this moment in American politics.

It was fun and I’m hoping to do more of these live conversations in the future; I find they are easier than TV and enjoy the interactivity with you readers. There is a link to the recording at the top of this email, and you can also listen to it as a podcast if you open this email in the Substack app.

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