The Strength In Numbers Podcast with G. Elliott Morris

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  The case for and against the polls 08.10.2026 1h 6min

  Watch this video on gelliottmorris.com.On this week’s Strength In Numbers podcast, G. Elliott Morris and David Nir explain why polls could underestimate either the Democrats or the Republicans this November. You can make a good case either way.Plus, will Democrats win a majority of governors’ mansions for the first time since 2009?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 few big takeaways from the conversation:* Polls underestimated Republicans in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Why did they do that? Is it possible we’re seeing the same biases now? Or have pollsters overcorrected for their past misfires and are now undershooting Democrats?* Pollsters could be increasing the weight on very pro-Trump segments of the population. Due to possible error from something pollsters call “recall bias,” there might be too many MAGA Republicans in surveys—especially if disaffected Trump voters are claiming they did not in fact vote for him in the past.* Or, super-engaged respondents are flooding polls with pro-Democratic attitudes. Elliott finds that “high-effort” respondents lean Democratic. If they’re overrepresented in polls (as they have been in the past), this could be costing Republicans about a point or 2 on average.* Democrats look favored to net at least two governorships, and could win back a majority of states’ executive posts for the first time since 2009. But there are a ton of extremely close races, so if Democrats finish strong, that number could grow.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
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  Paul Krugman, Elliott Morris, and David Nir on the blue wave 03.10.2026 48min

  This is an upload of a guest appearance on Paul Krugman’s Substack, recorded September 30, 2026.Watch this video on gelliottmorris.com.Paul Krugman had David Nir, who co-hosts the SIN podcast with me, and me on his weekly interview show this Thursday, and the video is out this morning. Paul has graciously agreed to let us repost the video interview and transcript here. In this recording, we talk about (obviously) the state of the midterms — particularly the now-quite-rosy odds of the Democrat taking the House and Senate in November. We also talk about (go figure) the economy, and the counterintuitive finding from historical midterms that economic growth and other objective indicators typically don’t predict midterm outcomes well. What matters far more than any indicator is the label of the party in control of the White House. Of course, when everyone is saying they're mad about prices and only ~20% say the incumbent party is handling the issue well, that tends to have an effect electorally too.We also get into the chance of a large polling miss this year, like in some notable recent elections. I give a reminder that tools like election forecasting models, when done well, can represent uncertainty in the election given measurement error in the indicators.Thanks to Paul and David for a great discussion. Here are some links, and I’ve pasted the transcript below for easy reading.ElliottTranscript Paul Krugman: Like almost everybody I know, I spend about 17 hours a day thinking about the midterms, and I’ve got G. Elliott Morris and David Nir from Strength in Numbers and The Downballot here to talk to me about: What do we know? What’s going to happen? What are the indicators? And then maybe some broader issues about what the heck we think is going on in U.S. politics. So, hi, guys. Welcome.Elliott Morris: Hey, thanks, Paul.David Nir: Paul, it’s a pleasure.Krugman: So, yeah, as we record this, I guess it’s one month and two days before the midterms, and if I believe you guys, the polling and other indicators, which David will talk about, seem to be almost kind of shocking right now. Elliott, I just looked at your Fifty Plus One post, and I believe you now have 99% odds of Democrats controlling the House.Morris: Yeah, well, it’s October, Paul. So we’re in what I consider spooky probability territory. 99% is when you start to go, “I hope these models are parameterized correctly.” Look, the way to unpack this: Our model at 50 Plus One shows a 99% chance that the Democrats will win 218 seats or more. 99% seems very large. As the forecaster, I don’t want to be wrong on the 99, but it makes sense when you look at the numbers on paper.So, let’s take 2018 as a comparison case. That’s when Democrats won 235 seats in the House. That year, the generic ballot—which is a question that asks people how they will vote in their local congressional district, for which party they will vote—that has Democrats up somewhere between 8 and 9 points. Democrats won in 2018, leading the polls by about 8 or 9 points. They actually won the House popular vote by seven and a half points or so, if you account for some weirdness with, like, uncontested seats. So we are in a more favorable environment, if the polls are right, than 2018. And we also have a lot of other district-level indicators pointing the same way.Krugman: But, I mean, the gerrymandering was fairly extreme before this, and if we go back to the beginning of this year, it was looking a little iffy, if I recall.Morris: Yeah. So gerrymandering seems to have shifted maybe a handful of seats at most to the Republicans, accounting for some pretty rosy polling, for example, in South Texas and in Florida for the Democrats, where there’s been a larger shift than the national shift, which is about 10 or 11 percentage points. So if we are around eight points, our model says Democrats need to win the House popular vote by about three and a half points. So there’s room for the polls to be wrong by about five.The average expected error for the polls at this point, 30 days before the election, is about three and a half percentage points. So we’re looking at a larger-than-average error in the polls. And then if you account for other indicators, district-level surveys, the race raters like we do, that’s how we get up to that 99. But yeah, I acknowledge this is a very, very large probability.Nir: And Paul, just to address your point about the gerrymandering, which did heavily favor the GOP, it’s important to remember that Republicans were not doing that from a position of strength. They were doing it from a position of weakness, precisely because they knew that they were facing a very difficult midterm election. And they definitely—I can say this with certainty—definitely will not pick up, they will not flip, all of the seats that they targeted in Texas and Florida and elsewhere. And that has a lot to do with the quality of candidate recruitment on both sides.And also, in particular in Texas and Florida as well, has a lot to do with Latino voters moving back against Trump after moving heavily for him in 2024. So, 2024 in a lot of ways was a high watermark. And so when you’re looking at how Trump performed in these districts two years ago, in a lot of cases, expect really a lot of fallback for the GOP.Krugman: Tell me if I’m being underinformed here, but my understanding is that the gerrymandering was based, at least partially, on the assumption that the Hispanic shift towards Trump that took place in ‘24 was an enduring feature of the landscape, and that it all kind of goes wrong if, as now appears to be the case, it’s not enduring. Right?Nir: That’s definitely what it appears to be. Because if you look at these redrawn districts, and instead of looking at how they went in 2024, if you go back a few years earlier and look at how they performed in 2020, when Joe Biden did much better with Latino voters than Kamala Harris did in many parts of the country, they show a much more competitive picture. And so you have Republicans talking about, you know, “Oh, these districts are Trump plus five, Trump plus ten, Trump plus 15.” But that’s 2024. You dial back to 2020, and suddenly we’re talking about districts that Joe Biden won, that Democrats have a real chance of holding on to in 2026.Krugman: Okay. And I want to talk about other indicators, and polling in general. But just a question about the Senate: So now, we’re up into the 70s again for the Senate, right? And that’s a lot less. I mean, the Senate is sort of inherently gerrymandered. States that have about the population of some neighborhoods in the Bronx have as many seats. So, yeah. But that’s also looking pretty strong, right?Morris: Well, speaking of state gerrymandering, don’t get me started about the drawing of the state border of Nevada. I mean, that was a gerrymander, right? So, look, the Democrats have 47 seats right now. They need 51 to have a majority and to overcome JD Vance’s tiebreaker as president of the Senate. So they need four pickups. They look likely, according to our model, to get a pickup in North Carolina, where the former governor, Roy Cooper, is running against the current chair of the Republican National Committee. So that’s what’s on my mind.They look then likely as well to somewhere between a sort of toss-up and a lean Democratic seat in Texas and Ohio, where Democrats have got some good recruits in James Talarico and Sherrod Brown, a former incumbent senator of Ohio. And I should say Democrats are also very likely to hold on to their seat in Georgia, just for what it’s worth. And then we get into the seats that are, like, a lot, a lot tighter. That’s Iowa, currently Republican-held, but where the Democrat, Josh Turek, is leading the polls; Maine, where the polls were somewhat, you know, incredibly wrong in 2020, showing Susan Collins losing to—Nir: Sarah Gideon.Morris: See, this is why we do it together, Paul, right?Krugman: Yeah, I know, it’s okay.Morris: And then there’s Michigan, which seems like it should be a Democratic win in an environment where Democrats are ahead by eight points on the generic ballot. But the race is surprisingly close between Abdul El-Sayed and Mike Rogers. And there’s like a bunch of other reach seats that might be competitive. We can talk about Kansas, where Democrats currently have a polling deficit of under half a point in Kansas. Like, what’s the matter with Kansas?Krugman: Yeah. I mean, objectively, Trump policies, especially a war that’s driven up diesel prices and fertilizer prices and all of that, has been really pretty bad for farm country. But I don’t know to what extent we’re seeing that, to what extent we’re just seeing really just bad Republican recruitment or just general Trump fatigue.Morris: I’ll say one thing about the numbers and then hand it over to David. But the other Plains states—Nebraska, Iowa, and Kansas are the ones I’m thinking of—are all much more competitive than you would expect, given the fact that Donald Trump won these places by, you know, between 10 and 28 percentage points. I think in the case of Nebraska, if I’m remembering correctly. These are all within a point or so in the polls today, and back in 2025, when I was looking at Trump’s approval rating and all of the polling we do at Strength in Numbers.So these are individual interviews from these Plains states. Donald Trump was also much less popular than you would expect, given his margins, and deportations and, and tariffs especially were very unpopular, or even more unpopular than Trump overall in these places. So, I think you’ve triangulated maybe there’s more economic pain in these places. Donald Trump has certainly very publicly pushed for these policies. So I can imagine voters are putting more blame on him directly because of the press conferences for tariffs in the early part of last year.Nir: And Paul, I would say you’re exactly right to bring up diesel prices, because as bad as gas prices have gotten, you know, diesel has gotten much more expensive. And an attack on diesel prices is almost perfectly an attack on Trump’s base, because diesel is what’s used to carry goods in these Plains states that Elliott is talking about. It’s so important to the agricultural world, and Trump is really assaulting his own most loyal voters as hard as possible.But it’s not just on that front, as Elliott said. You know, Republicans are upset about the stepped-up ICE raids in Kansas affecting the cattle industry. And so I think it’s just so many factors all combined together. You probably can’t pull just one out of them. And I think that they combine to make a lot of people feel like they’re just not being heard in general at all.Krugman: Yeah. I mean, it’s one of those things where, for once, being an effete, liberal northeasterner makes me understate the amount of trouble that Trump is in, connected to diesel, because there’s not a whole lot of people driving tractors down the New Jersey Turnpike.Nir: Not usually.Krugman: But yeah, it’s actually kind of shocking to realize that gas sales are about two-thirds gasoline, one-third diesel, and the price of diesel is way up. So the actual pump shock out of the Iran war is more diesel than it is gasoline. And that’s hitting the states really hard.One of the questions we all have now is, you know, polling. But David, you have this other indicator, which is kind of a cross-check on the polling, right? I want to hear about that, because I think it’s important.Nir: It’s really fascinating, and I’m glad you brought it up. So at The Downballot, my colleague Daniel Donner published a new study recently, and we’re pretty sure that no one has actually looked at what Daniel looked at in precisely this way. So folks often ask, does turnout in primaries have anything to say about general elections? And they usually look at it on a state-by-state or case-by-case basis. Democrats, for instance, had incredibly strong turnout in the Texas primaries this year, better than Republicans, which is extremely unusual for Texas. So, does that actually mean anything for November? And when you look at these individual data points to compare primary turnout and general election performance, things kind of go all haywire.But what Daniel did was he decided to look at primary turnout across the entire country. And he didn’t just do it for one year. He went back more than 100 years. And it turns out that there is a very close relationship in what we’re calling this national primary, when you add up primary votes for all 50 states, and then you look at the national House popular vote in the subsequent general election.And what Daniel did, his real innovation here, it’s almost like he took the first derivative, because instead of looking at what primary turnout is in a given year, he looked at the change from midterm to midterm. And so if you look at the 2022 turnout, Democrats didn’t do particularly well that year. In fact, they are doing in 2026, 18 points better in this national primary that Dan essentially created synthetically. And what that extrapolates to, is that Democrats are looking like they’re doing 16 points better than in 2022, when you modify things a little bit, because, you know, Kamala Harris lost the popular vote in 2024.But what this points to is a Democratic margin in the House popular vote of 13 points, which is considerably higher than what the current congressional ballot, the generic congressional ballot that Elliott was talking about, is pointing to. That’s around D+8. But what’s so important is that these metrics are all pointing in the same direction. And when we back-test this, when we look at how these perform historically, if these metrics are pointing in the same direction, then they tend to collectively be pretty accurate in predicting the House popular vote, which points to a real blowout for Democrats.Krugman: I’m supposed to pretend to be objective and say “just the facts,” but actually I do care about how this election turns out. And what’s a little bit reassuring is these are actual votes. It’s sort of like the two things that we have that are actual votes, which are primary turnouts, and then special elections are not just based upon: Do people actually pick up the phone or actually respond online?But how worried should we be? Response rates on polling are so low now, and how well are the pollsters managing to deal with this environment where people [are so overwhelmed with robocalls]? I think two-thirds of the time when my phone rings, it’s from my good friend, Spam Risk?Nir: Hey, I’m buddies with them too.Morris: Look, I really don’t have a whole lot of comfort for people who just want the polls to be right, because we just don’t know. Like, we just don’t know if the decisions pollsters are making to combat non-response bias—and I will define that—if their methodology, their decisions are right. Because, you know, the capital-P problem in polling is that the people that answer the phone are very often not like the people who don’t answer the phones. They’re not representative of the whole population.That was true in 1936, the first big test of scientific polling, when there were too many high-income, Republican-leaning voters. It was the same case in 1948. It’s just been true for the entire history of this instrument. And pollsters have a lot of really fancy things they can do to try to make the poll look like the population in terms of demographics, because we do have a national poll funded by the U.S. government called the census every ten years. So we know how many white or Black or young or poor people there should be. We don’t know how many Democrats there should be in a poll, or how many Democratic voters for the upcoming election there should be, because that election hasn’t happened yet.So we’re just left looking for signs that the polls are wrong. And I’ll say a couple words about that, and also just exploring what potential outcomes could happen given the fact that polls have been wrong before. That’s what our election forecast does. But the polls are +8 right now. As I said earlier, average error in the generic ballot is three points. Let’s simulate a lot of different elections given that distribution of error, the three-point standard deviation on error. What could that election look like? And we answer that question through the election forecast.So then the thing that’s left is checking—checking the polling data. One thing we do at Strength in Numbers is to take a predictive model of how people voted in 2024, trained on 2024 data, not our current polling data, and predict the Democratic or Republican lean of the people who are actually answering our survey. And there’s some potential bias in that. But the trendline is really important, because if the types of people who are answering your poll in 2025, for example, look like a Donald Trump plus-one electorate based off of your predictive models, and then that drifts over time to be, you know, Harris +1, Harris +4, Harris +5, then you have some good indications that the types of people you’re getting are too Democratic. But we do not see that. It’s a totally flat line.That’s one thing we’ve done. And there’s some other things we can do to look for red flags of non-response ahead of time, and basically they’re all fine right now. So I’m as confident as I ever am that the polls are right. I’m never really all that confident. That’s why we simulate the election.Krugman: And in both your guys’ modeling, how much are you also doing fundamentals? For instance, state of the economy. And also, economic surveys, which may be less politicized.Morris: The only fundamental that matters in a midterm election is the president’s approval rating. That might not be a fundamental for an economist. But historically, you know, growth in GDP, change in real disposable income, change in employment rate—these things have very little correlation to midterm election outcomes.Krugman: Okay.Morris: The only real structural factor is who’s the party in the White House. And to some extent, how many seats do they hold right now? There tends to be a slightly larger punishment historically when the party in the White House holds a bunch of seats. But that’s maybe a gerrymandering factor.So, I do think the economic discontent in the country matters, but it is probably being proxied through the polling right now. It’s not the type of thing that is historically predictive of a midterm election in the way that these things are predictive of presidential elections.Krugman: That’s interesting. I’ve been maybe a little off on that. I knew about the historically very strong predictive power of the economic variables, but for presidential elections. And so are you saying there’s no independent effect, or really just that it doesn’t help you at all with midterms, even if you didn’t have the polling?Morris: Yeah. There’s a very weak correlation between some of these economic fundamentals and the outcome of the election. If you then look out of sample at your predictive accuracy of a model that is trained on previous elections using these fundamentals and test out-of-sample, it’s even worse. And yes, once you start accounting for some other factors, like literally not even the president’s approval rating, just which party’s in the White House, then any relationship totally falls away.Krugman: Which does kind of raise a bit of a question, right? If you drop the presidential approval rating, then you still don’t get very much, right?Morris: So, yeah, I mean, there is a positive correlation, but I think we’re looking at a +0.4 correlation here.Krugman: Yeah. But then there are the obvious fundamentals: there’s the price of diesel, there’s just generally really bad vibes about the economy. But how do we reconcile that with the fact that the midterms look at this point so much like a blowout? What’s driving that?Morris: Well, I think the economic discontent is a big part of the equation here. You know, Paul, we’ve talked about the “vibe session” on your podcast previously. So, there might be some other residual, just disapproval or poor rating on the economy that people map onto politics. Just because this isn’t a historical explanation for why midterms go the way they go doesn’t necessarily mean that it doesn’t matter this time around.The thing I’ve identified in U.S. politics over the last year and a half of writing my Substack is just a very endemic, anti-status-quo, anti-incumbent bias. In our polling, like 70% of people say that they face significant hardship from inflation even this year. So I think these are all jumbled together.Nir: And also we have seen some pretty remarkable correlations. In particular, when you drill down on Donald Trump’s approval rating about the economy and prices in general. Elliott, we have these wild graphs that when you look at Trump’s approval rating and overlay it with the change in gas prices and just shift it just by a couple of weeks, because the polls always lag a little bit, then they match up almost perfectly. Gas prices really do seem to dictate how people view Donald Trump’s success on prices. And so there’s no question that this anger is feeding into his low approval rating.Krugman: During the Bush years we used to talk about that correlation a lot. And then, it seemed to go away. And now it’s kind of back. We used to say it was really terrible that so much seemed to depend upon gas prices over which the president really has no control. Which is not exactly true at this point, though, right?Morris: Yeah. Historically I think that is right, yeah. This president has done a remarkable job of very publicly taking very unpopular stances on the policies that Americans notice the most, which is a very unique combination. And that might be the most simple explanation for why this midterm is going the way it looks like it’s going to go.Krugman: Yeah. I mean, a couple of questions related to that. How much do you think Trump is paying a price for all of those extravagant promises he made in 2024? Do people remember that? It’s always a question in my mind. For political pundits, we’re always saying, “You said this, and now you say that.” But does the public have a memory of these things?Morris: I don’t have any quantitative data on this, so I will get into anecdotal territory here. I watched a segment on CNN—yes, I do watch cable news sometimes—earlier this week, with a reporter just interviewing people at a gas station in Florida and interviewing former Trump voters. And there’s some sentiment of dissatisfaction. People say, “Oh, things aren’t going well.” And maybe two out of the ten people they interviewed said, “I feel betrayed.” Someone said “hoodwinked.”So I think that is definitely an undercurrent we could identify, but it would be very hard, putting on my quantitative hat here, to identify how many voters the Republican Party has lost over the last year and a half due to Trump making such large promises. There’s definitely, in hindsight, I think for him, a bit of an own goal to be promising prices are going to go down on day one. But maybe he doesn’t actually care about the midterms or 2028. He just wanted to be president again, in which case maybe it was worth it for him.Nir: And we’ve seen the same thing with his immigration enforcement policy. How many articles have we read featuring quotes from ordinary Americans, many of whom voted for Trump and said, “Oh, I voted for him to deport the violent criminals. I didn’t vote for him to deport the lovely fellow who’s been living and working in my community for 20 years,” and we might all smack our foreheads or get very angry about what feels like a lot of naivete about that.But I am struck, even to this point, we’re now in October of 2026, how many times voters say, “This is what I thought Trump was going to do and he did X.” So two years later, people are still saying, yeah, “This was what we thought the promise was and he’s breaking it.”Krugman: Yeah. Again, you guys are tracking this systematically. I’m not. But there does seem to be an abnormally large number of people willing to say, “I made a mistake in 2024.”Morris: Yeah, about 15%, I believe, of Trump’s voters on average, according to some polls. A Navigator Research poll came out last month, in September, that showed 20% of Trump’s 2024 voters say they regret—they will agree with a poll question using the words “regret” their vote in the last election.I don’t have comparable numbers, but just in absolute terms, if Donald Trump loses a quarter of his vote, or even if he loses a quarter of that 20%, then the 2024 election is like a Dukakis-style electoral defeat for the Republican Party in 2024. That’s a meaningful slice of the electorate, even 4 or 5%.Krugman: I am still thinking about “vibe sessions” and all of that stuff. And there’s one thing I noticed, and maybe it’s just one poll, but in the new AP-NORC poll, one of the things that was true consistently through the whole Biden era was that if you asked people, “How is the national economy doing?” they said, “Terrible.” You asked them, how is your local economy doing? And it was much better. And that gap is now gone.It’s an interesting thing. I don’t know exactly where this fits in all this. But it is interesting that we’re no longer in a period where people are, you know, hearing bad stuff, but personally experiencing better stuff. Just generally, everyone is really pretty mad at the state of things now, which probably has something to do with all of these numbers. I think that was a complete non-sequitur given our previous conversation, but whatever.Morris: No, I think there’s something to triangulate here. And in that same poll, I think Donald Trump’s approval rating on the economy among Republicans is at an all-time low in this new survey out this morning from AP-NORC.But, I’ll back up from first principles here. Much of the conversation about the inflated or deflated consumer expectations and consumer sentiment over the past year has been about this idea that people are overindexing on the national economy, which may or may not be true. This survey seems to indicate maybe some movement towards convergence. If that’s the case, Republicans are, I hasten to say, dramatically more exposed to inflation in diesel and gas prices.Krugman: Yeah.Morris: And so I think we’re at the point in this cycle where after 15 months of inflationary statistics and inflationary news, Republican voters would be now coming around to the idea that this isn’t working out for them the way that they wanted.In our Strength in Numbers September poll, we also found Trump at an all-time low approval among Republicans. So, our mental model is that maybe independents are super rational and everyone else isn’t. And so Democrats and Republicans wouldn’t be reacting to economic news as much as independents. That’s just the traditional understanding. So it would take a pretty cataclysmic-like event for Republican voters to then be saying, “I disapprove of this Republican president.” About 20, 25% of them do now. So I think these are all sort of related in my mind and my sort of mental model of voter psychology at this point.Krugman: Okay. So backing up from there, we think we have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen in the midterms, maybe—definitely in the House, and maybe the Senate—but Elliott, you’ve written a lot about this, and I think David as well—the extent to which people treated 2024 as a real seismic moment, defining a fact that American politics is never going to be the same. That’s really awesomely wrong, isn’t it?Nir: Yeah. I mean, there’s this old saw in baseball that the good teams win close games, and that’s just not true. The good teams win blowouts, and the pundit class and so much of the media and frankly, a lot of politicians, including politicians in the Democratic Party, they failed to grasp that Trump won by one and a half points in 2024. That’s really about as close as it gets.And I think that because the stakes of Trump winning felt so extreme and so dramatic, and you knew it was going to be so much worse than his first term, that kind of mentally or maybe even emotionally translated into something that felt like an absolute drubbing. But electorally, it simply wasn’t. And anyone at the time who was crowing about some Republican conservative era of cultural dominance, a massive sea change, wound up being wrong. And there were a lot of people who were saying, no, this is totally wrong. People like Elliott. Elliott was outspoken on this. He said it was a close election. It doesn’t mean what you think it means. And folks who hew to that view were totally vindicated.Morris: Well, lo and behold.You know, I actually give people a lot less credit than David did, given my previous employment situation. I think that there’s just an endemic bias in Washington, D.C. Well, there’s a couple of them. One is to make every story the biggest story. If you want to run like three or four days of TV coverage of Donald Trump because people are tuning in, you can’t just say, “Oh, he won a small election.” He has to have won a big election so that you can do that TV coverage that is performing well so you can justify seeking the ratings journalistically. I think that’s part of it.And maybe you saw this in your past lives as well—a tendency for pundits to draw patterns out of one or two data points for the sake of narration. And I think that’s something that’s going on here, too. But I think the real meat of it was just that a lot of journalists write stories to seem smarter than everyone else. And one way to seem smarter than everyone else in Donald Trump’s victory is to just say that the liberal class of journalists were all wrong: “Look at this. Look at this huge victory. We now have to adapt to this new world we’re in where Donald Trump is winning huge victories so that we continue to not be—not be like a Democratic liberal herd.” That’s an instinct that is especially strong in the more rationalist, empirical publications, say, and I think it breeds a lot of bad storytelling.The other thing that was a product of this was the constant humdrum about illiberalism on college campuses, starting in 2010 and right up to 2022, 2023. Well, what’s the real illiberalism on college campuses after 2025? What’s the real threat to free speech on college campuses after 2025? It’s probably not students preventing certain speakers from coming. It’s probably more the attacks on freedom of collegiate education writ large. So I think that that is another example of journalists missing the broader story going on for the sake of trying to appear smart to their peers.Krugman: Yeah. When I was more part of the sort of conventional, journalistic milieu—which I never was very much, but somewhat—the idea was everything had to be counterintuitive. And then being against liberal pieties, and so precisely because Trump was so horrible from the point of view of any kind of conventional liberal pespective, therefore it seemed important to talk up how epoch-making and transformative he was. That was part of being counterintuitive.And in some sense, the fact that somebody so self-evidently harmful to have won had to mean that there was something supernatural about his appeal, when in fact, the reality is that most normal people don’t actually pay that much attention.Nir: You know, Paul, when I first started reading you, it was back when you were at Slate. And that reminds me of the infamous Slate pitch. Not that you were ever guilty of that, but the contrarian, counterintuitive, anti-liberal piety article that Slate made famous.Krugman: Yeah, exactly. Most people won’t even remember, but the Slate pitch was, roughly speaking, “Here’s why running down cyclists is a good thing.”Morris: It’s the “Um, actually...” article, right?Krugman: Right, yeah.Morris: And this goes back to that sort of anti-incumbency bias that stems from economic hardship. There’s just a tendency for voters to want to throw the bums out, to borrow that old phrase. There’s just an endemic negativity in the American public right now. And voters really want some big changes. I mean, in our survey, like 55% of voters every month—this percentage barely changes—say that major disruptive changes are needed to the nation’s political system and economy, whereas like 7% of people say things are going well for them. There is a middle option, for what it’s worth. But like those extremes, there’s a very wide imbalance in those extremes. And you would expect from that a tendency to punish the incumbent party, or pretty much whoever is in charge.Paul, in one of our earlier conversations last year, we also talked a lot about the low-information voters who I know you’ve written about. This is a good part in our conversation to remind all the high-information listeners out there: Most Americans are not like us, not like you. About 50% of Americans say they do not get news on a weekly basis.Krugman: Isn’t your definition of the information voter—you think it’s some kind of insult, but you just mean people who don’t know which party controls Congress, right?Morris: Right. So this is sort of the low engagement voter. And then there is the actual low-information people, which is not really a putdown. Like we all have stuff going on. It takes a lot of energy to know what’s going on in politics.On our survey only about 80% of people can say who controls both houses of Congress. We will be asking this question on a recurring basis in an upcoming project that is yet to be announced, a weekly survey at Strength in Numbers, which is exciting, and I imagine this number will be really helpful for us to track Democratic and Republican vote share, Trump approval and such by those voters who are or are not high or low information, or high or low engagement.Those are the people who decide elections, and this is my broader point. Those are the people who decided the 2024 election: People who sort of remembered in the folds in their brain that things used to be better, so let’s go back to those things. Now, they’re in the sort of find-out stage of the F.A.F.O. And I think they will inevitably vote Democrats in charge and expect big changes.And the three of us can probably forecast the number of major transformative changes that will come from Democratic Party leadership in Congress under the Donald Trump presidency, or even under a unified Congress in 2028, which is probably not a whole lot, let’s be honest. I imagine the American people will then punish the Democratic Party just as harshly.Krugman: Yeah, well, certainly the next Democratic president, by inheriting reality, will simply be at a disadvantage.I’m going to ask one last thing: the AI data centers. This is the political storm that I did not see coming. The apparent intensity of opposition is a surprise. And Trump—I’m sure that he has absolutely no idea about how the models work, but—Morris: “Let data reign!”He had a tweet where he said, “Let data reign,” right?Krugman: Yeah, but is this going to matter? I’ve been seeing some people saying that at least in a couple of swing states, it might actually be an important factor.Nir: I think so. Like you said, Paul, this issue almost feels like it came out of nowhere. The intensity of the anger. When you look at the polls now, I mean, huge majorities say that they oppose, for instance, building new hyperscale data centers in their neighborhoods or in their areas. And even six months ago, the numbers were much less opposed. And there is no question in my mind that so many voters are using this as an opportunity to take a stand against so many of the things that they don’t like: you know, the tech bro oligarchs, AI being shoved into every last corner of our lives. And these data centers are a stand-in for that.And, boy, there have been so many ads run on them, Paul. And most of the ads are being run by Democrats. It is definitely one of the top issues that we are seeing coming up this year. It’s not just gas prices. It’s not just Trump’s mass deportation policy. Data centers are definitely playing a real role in some of these races. And what we’re going to see is a lot of races, especially governorships in Midwestern states that have leaned red in recent years, they’re probably going to be pretty close. And I think that when you’re on the wrong side of an issue like this, that you could lose a close race as a result.I look at the example of Governor Greg Abbott, who has never had to sweat a general election. Now he’s running against Democrat Gina Hinojosa. Polls show it very, very close. And all of a sudden, Greg Abbott, this ultraconservative team-player guy for the MAGA movement, is coming out in favor of data center moratoriums and issuing executive orders to that effect. And so I think there’s no way he’d be doing that if he wasn’t afraid that this was a real issue that has lit a huge fire under voters.Morris: I mean, he was approving the Starbase project for Sam Altman and Oracle, I believe in Texas, just this time last year. And now he says you have to go through “special approval,” which just means delays, right?One place this might show up in our polling data from September is our question: which party do you think cares more about people like you? This was really bad for the Democrats in 2024, for example. Now they have a pretty large lead. About 38% of people say Democrats care more about them. 26% of people say the Republican Party cares more about them. It’s very interesting. There’s the next category of people, the 7% who say both parties care equally about them, and I guess people could be reading that as both parties care a lot about me, or neither party cares about me at all. 22% of people say neither party cares most about people like me. It’s kind of a comparative question. So maybe we’ll change that wording now that I’m thinking about it.But I imagine getting up at his press conferences with the tech billionaires, hosting them at state dinners, tweeting—or I guess, truth posting via Truth Social? Truthing? Truthers? Yeah. Truthing that “Let data reign” comment and saying communities are going to be backwards if they reject data centers, it makes sense to me that they would say, “Oh, that guy, the Republican Party guy who’s on the wrong side of the biggest land use issue right now, which is dramatically unpopular—that party doesn’t care about me. Maybe the Democrats do now.” But there is a notable seesawing in that question across the elections, too. It just goes back to the sort of anti-incumbency undercurrent.Nir: Yeah. And Elliott, I think, to that point, and Paul, getting back to what you said earlier about how the punditry just totally misunderstood 2024, how much talk did we see about polls showing that the Democratic Party’s brand was in poor shape? Those polls are absolutely true, and those voters’ feelings were absolutely understandable, but it simply missed the fact that people have to actually vote for one or the other. And even if they dislike both parties, these so-called double haters, they have to make a choice or stay home altogether.And so I think ignore the polling on political parties’ standing and look at the polling of voter intentions. And that’s going to tell you a totally different story. People can still vote for Democrats even if they’re not happy with them.Krugman: Yeah. Neither of you, happily for your own sanity, is in the business of modeling the mind of Donald Trump.Morris: Thank God.Krugman: But to choose this of all issues to really go on. I guess I thought maybe he doesn’t care at this point, but I would have thought that this would be a good time to pretend to be worried about data centers and AI and all of that.Morris: Well, we have to consider maybe—I don’t want to do too much putting myself in the mind of Donald Trump because, oh, God. But we can think about the information environment he’s operating under, which is like the CNN headlines: about 99% of self-identified MAGA voters still approve of Donald Trump. You say, okay, well, that’s tautological. Whatever. He’s just insulated by these tech billionaires in and out of the White House. That’s practically his social circle at this point.Nir: Right.Morris: And then to the extent he gets information, it’s either fed to him by staffers who spend all day on X or Truth Social or whatever. Streaming news, or whatever cable news service currently exists for the right. But especially X, which is very endemic with super right-wing tech bros on there. I mean, Elon Musk being the number one example. If you’re operating any type of business and that’s the information environment you’re in, maybe you just don’t believe all the polls for the midterms. Maybe you don’t believe that people see these moves as unpopular.Not to give him any credit, right? But I think the “X factor,” as David has called it, I believe, is a real problem in American politics. And you can see it operating chiefly in the chief executive.Krugman: And there we are. Okay. Well, let’s hope that they’re in the bubble and we aren’t. Thanks a lot. And we’ll probably want to have a conversation after the midterms and figure out now what.Morris: I’ll tell you if they happen.Krugman: Yeah, if they happen.Morris: That’s a joke. Hoping they happen.Nir: Oh, Elliott! Don’t go there.Morris: Okay, I’m kidding.Krugman: No, I’m quite sure the elections will proceed. And then we’ll have a coup that will overturn it. But never mind. Sorry.Nir: Guys! Let’s pull it together!Krugman: Ok, ok. Well, thanks so much for speaking with me.Morris: Always a pleasure. 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
• 
  How much worse can things get for the GOP? 01.10.2026 56min

  Watch this video on gelliottmorris.com.On this week’s Strength In Numbers podcast, Elliott Morris and David Nir walk through the current electoral state of play just over one month out from the 2026 midterm elections.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 few big takeaways from the conversation:* The House at 99% is in “spooky probability territory™,” but the seat-level math adds up. In Elliott’s forecast model at FiftyPlusOne, Democrats need only about a 3.5-point national margin to win the majority, and they're polling 5 to 6 points better than that. For Republicans to hold on, the polls would have to move about five times more than they historically do in the last month, or miss by roughly twice the usual error.* Democrats have a 73% chance at the Senate because of the long shots, not the toss-ups. If you only look at the competitive seats, the Senate looks like a coin flip. But election forecasting models also pick up on Democratic upsets in the 20-to-30% zone (Florida, South Carolina, Kansas, Nebraska) that drag their median up to 52 seats.* David makes the case that red-state Republicans have forgotten how to campaign. In states like Kansas and Texas, GOP candidates are making big missteps that would be unlikely for someone accustomed to running competitive races. Can you lose your general election campaign muscles?* Elliott and David answer listener questions about cross-over voting and modeling polling errors.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
• 
  Is this what a "blue wave" feels like? 24.09.2026 1h 5min

  On this week’s Strength In Numbers podcast, Elliott Morris and David Nir dig into the latest batch of good news for Democrats: an all-time low for Trump's approval rating in our monthly Strength in Numbers/Verasight poll; a record Democratic lead on the generic ballot; and a flurry of Senate polls showing the party competitive in states as red as Texas, Iowa, Ohio, and Kansas. We ask if this is what the political environment felt like in past wave elections, such as 2018—or even 2006.We also share previously unreleased polling on Trump's promise to send every American a $5,000 check if his party wins the midterms (teaser: it doesn’t poll well!); answer your questions about the new New York Times/Siena poll in Maine; and respond to a recent piece arguing that polling has become a playground for grifters, liars, and frauds. Elliott thinks social media is the problem, not polling.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 few big takeaways from the conversation:* Republicans continue to slide in the polls. According to Elliott’s election model, Democrats now have about a 70% chance of winning complete control of Congress this November. Trump’s net approval (-28 on average) is nearly three times worse than it was before the 2018 midterms, and Republicans are sweating races like Kansas Senate and Oklahoma’s 5th District (the latter of which Trump won by 18 points in 2026).* Our new poll finds that voters saw Trump’s $5,000 checks as a bribe. Trump’s approval is 33% with 63% disapproving in our September Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll, and Democrats lead the generic ballot by 10 among likely voters. Trump’s promise to send every American adult $5,000 if Republicans win the midterm is underwater by 18 points generally, with 66% of U.S. adults (64% of Republicans) calling it inappropriate. A plurality of Republicans believe Trump made his promise just to win more votes and doesn’t intend to actually send checks.* One poll shouldn’t move your priors much, but the race can still move a lot by November. A new New York Times/Siena poll out today showing Susan Collins up 3 points in Maine moves the average in the state by about half a point in isolation. Senate polling averages have historically shifted about 4.5 points in the final six weeks. There is a correct balance between updating your beliefs the right amount given new data (a small amount, IF you have a lot of data) and being open to the possibility of big changes in the future.* Fake “polls” are a problem with social media, not polling itself. Elliott responds to a piece arguing that polling has been polluted by grifters and frauds. But fake and AI-generated polls spread mostly through low-quality aggregator accounts on X, and web panels from quality pollsters have been at least as accurate as phone polls in recent years. The fix for this is better gatekeeping, and critics have to be careful not to discredit polls more broadly.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
• 
  The blue wave is getting bigger 17.09.2026 51min

  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
• 
  Republicans who think "Trumpapalooza" will work misunderstand why Trump won in 2024 10.09.2026 1h 3min

  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
• 
  Donald Trump is acting like he *wants* to lose the midterms 03.09.2026 47min

  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
• 
  Deep Dive episode: Everything you wanted to know about prediction markets, with Rajiv Sethi 27.08.2026 58min

  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
• 
  A troubling trend of fake polls and lying pollsters, with FiftyPlusOne’s Mary Radcliffe 20.08.2026 46min

  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
• 
  Can we trust the polls in 2026? 13.08.2026 30min

  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
• 
  Deep Dive episode: What if our leaders are actually more responsive to public opinion than we think? 10.08.2026 58min

  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
• 
  Why the polls missed in Michigan — and why Democrats are favored to flip the House and Senate 06.08.2026 55min

  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
• 
  What's behind Trump's new all-time approval low? (The podcast returns!) 30.07.2026 53min

  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
• 
  Deep Dive episode: Ben Wikler has a plan to save democracy 21.07.2026 1h 24min

  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
• 
  A reminder: Very few people support Donald Trump's presidency 14.05.2026 47min

  On this week’s Strength In Numbers podcast — the last live episode before Elliott heads off on paternity leave — Elliott and David break down just how historically unpopular Donald Trump has become and dig into the surging public appetite for age limits on members of Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court.Here are the big takeaways:* Nobody likes Trump, and gas prices are only part of the story. Trump is sitting at roughly 36.8% approval and 59.7% disapproval in the 50+1 polling average — a net rating of about -23, making him the most unpopular president at this point in his term in modern history, worse even than Joe Biden during the 2022 inflation panic. He’s underwater in roughly 40 states, including big red ones like Georgia, Florida, and Texas, and all the swing states. On prices, his net approval is a brutal -40. Trump’s recent collapse tracks almost perfectly with the war in Iran: from late February to now, gas prices are up about 54% — and Trump’s approval on inflation is down by about the same percentage. And don’t count on a bounce-back — even if gas prices fall, Biden’s presidency suggests voters don’t forgive you for price shocks on your watch — and logistically it can take months to ship and refine oil imported from Iran, even if Trump does resolve the crisis.* Voters are losing confidence in Trump’s mental fitness for the job. Worse for the president, 61% of adults (including 30% of Republicans) say Trump has become erratic with age, and only 45% call him mentally sharp enough for the job (down from 54% pre-2024), and just 32% are extremely or very confident in his mental fitness per the Pew Research Center. Among independents, the “mentally sharp” percentage has cratered from 53% to 36%. Those numbers are still about ten points better than Biden’s in April 2024 — but the trend is not Trump’s friend.* Voters support term and age limits for federal officials. Roughly 80% of American adults — including 78% of Democrats, 83% of Republicans, and 79% of independents — back a maximum age for House and Senate candidates, a level of cross-partisan agreement that’s almost unheard of on a high-salience issue. Additionally, 61% of independents and 73% of Republicans back a presidential age limit, with 54% picking a cap of 79 or younger; 65% support an 18-year Supreme Court term limit, and 74% favor a maximum age for justices. The catch: the 1995 U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton decision held that states can’t add to the constitutional qualifications for Congress, likely dooming most age-limit laws — though North Dakota recently passed an age-limit law the Court could use to update the precedent, if challenged. In the meantime, primary voters are increasingly opting for candidates Since this is the last live show for a while, Elliott has pre-recorded a couple deep dives that will trickle into your feed over the next 4-6 weeks.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.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
• 
  Deep Dive episode: Democracy 2.0, with Lee Drutman 13.05.2026 1h 7min

  In this Deep Dive episode of the Strength In Numbers podcast, Elliott sits down with Lee Drutman, senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Representation in America, to talk about whether the way out of America’s escalating gerrymandering war isn’t legislation for fairer maps or redistricting commissions, but maybe doing away with districts altogether. Lee is one of the country’s leading advocates for proportional representation, and has a vision for a better democracy that is worth paying attention to!We cover the history of how the U.S. wound up with single-member districts in the first place, why proportional representation would render gerrymandering irrelevant and make multiple parties possible, what PR would actually look like from the voters’ perspective, and how Congress could move to a multi-party system without amending the Constitution. Here are the big takeaways:* Single-member districts are the problem, not how we draw them. Drutman argues that no “fair map” standard can resolve the underlying contradictions of the single-winner district, which force an impossible trade-off between partisan proportionality, competitiveness, compactness, communities of interest, and minority representation.* Proportional representation would make every vote count and give voters real choices. Under an open-list PR system, states divide voters into multi-member districts where parties win seats roughly in proportion to their vote share, making third and fourth parties viable and every district competitive. Lee that PR systems also produce more diverse representation, not less, because party leaders want to put forward lists that appeal to broad constituencies.* It could happen with one act of Congress — and the moment may be closer than people think. PR for House elections doesn’t require a constitutional amendment; Congress can amend the 1967 Uniform Congressional District Act under its Article I, Section 4 powers, and pair it with fusion voting (already legal in New York and Connecticut) for inherently single-winner offices like the presidency. Drutman thinks 2029 could open a window for a broader “democracy reconstruction” with PR as one piece.Thanks again to Lee for joining me for this special Deep Dive episode of 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 the podcast, the newsletter, and the time it takes to do this kind of analysis well. 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 reminder: Elliott and David Nir record the usual Strength In Numbers podcast live every Thursday at 2:00 PM Eastern. We always discuss a few pre-planned topics and then answer questions submitted live by viewers.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: 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
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  America's new redistricting doom loop 07.05.2026 47min

  On this week’s Strength In Numbers podcast, Elliott and David briefly revisit Elliott’s hypotheses on why economic vibes are still so sour before turning to the alarming speed at which Republican-led states are moving to redraw their congressional maps in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Callais decision last week.Here are the big takeaways:* The economic vibes may not be “normal” again until 2029 at the earliest — and that’s the optimistic scenario. Consumer sentiment is at its lowest level in the 60+ year history of the University of Michigan’s survey. Our model says the main (but not only) culprit is “excess prices”: Household goods cost roughly 15% more than they would have under the pre-2020 trend of 2% inflation, and people haven’t yet forgotten. If inflation returns to ~2.7%, sentiment recovers to its historical median around April 2029. If inflation stays at 3.5% or higher (as Trump’s tariffs, deportations, and the Iran war suggest it might), sentiment may take decades to recover to pre-COVID levels. An anecdote from a reader in Austria suggests it took residents about eight years to stop complaining about euro prices after the country switched its currency from the schilling, which lines up eerily well with our 2029–2030 projection.* Republican states are dismantling Black voting districts at breakneck speed after Callais. One week after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, the dominoes are already falling. Louisiana’s governor canceled the state’s primaries by invoking a statute normally deployed after hurricanes; Alabama is passing a law to allow do-over primaries so it can erase the Black-majority district created in 2024; and Tennessee just released a map that surgically splits Memphis into three almost equal pieces, turning one majority-Black district into three Trump+20 white districts. Combined with potential moves elsewhere throughout the South, Republicans could net 13–15 seats from racial gerrymandering alone—and in time for the 2026 elections.* We’re in a redistricting doom loop, and the only way out is structural electoral reform. America has a severe racial and partisan gerrymandering problem. Once one party abandons fairness, the other has to respond — and it’s a race to the bottom that shafts us, the voters. Elliott coded a computer redistricting simulator to show just how easily a 55-45 state can be turned into 80% one-party representation when partisan maximization replaces fair drawing. The Roberts Court has now ruled four times that partisan gerrymandering isn’t justiciable, and Republicans in Congress have derailed Democratic attempts at a remedy. Elliott vouches for a system of proportional representation, arguing that America’s district-based system was built for an era without parties and is no longer fit for purpose.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.If you missed our video livestream, you can watch it by clicking play on the web version of this post at gelliottmorris.com. We record the podcast live every Thursday at 2:00 PM Eastern. We always discuss a few pre-planned topics and then answer questions submitted live by viewers.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
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  Deep Dive episode: Political scientists were right about Trump 11.06.2026 58min

  Strength In Numbers is on a short summer break while Elliott takes paternity leave with his new baby. This deep dive episode was recorded in early May, and things may have changed since we recorded it.In this Deep Dive episode of the Strength In Numbers podcast, Elliott sits down with Seth Masket, political scientist at the University of Denver and author of the Smotus Report Substack, to swap interviews on what political scientists got right (and wrong) about Donald Trump, the constitutional fallout of Trump’s second term in general and the post-VRA redistricting arms race, and what Democrats actually learned — or refused to learn — from the 2024 election. Masket is the author of the new book The Elephants in the Room, a review of what the Republican Party learned from its loss in 2020 and how that shaped its decisions (or not) in 2024.Here are the big takeaways:* What political scientists got right about Trump in 2020 and 2024. Masket readily admits the discipline underestimated Trump’s ability to win the 2016 Republican primary, expecting his celebrity-without-insider-support campaign to flame out the way most do. But once Trump was in office, political scientists were largely correct in warning about election denial, attacks on the press, threats of political violence, and the refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. And after 2020, plenty of pundits wrote that Trump would simply “fade away” — despite primary elections and media coverage showing his iron grip on the GOP. * The Callais decision is supercharging a redistricting arms race. With the Supreme Court effectively gutting the protections of minority-majority districts, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, and other Republican-controlled states are moving to redraw maps mid-decade. Masket is optimistic and speculates that now that both parties are going to war over new maps, they may try to find some truce in new redistricting guidelines so they aren’t drawing new gerrymanders every two years. Both Elliott and Masket are increasingly drawn to proportional representation as a structural fix to these problems. A system where politicians can’t draw their own district lines has its own advantages, and having third, fourth, and even regional parties could force coalition-building and blunt the worst effects of partisan sorting. Some sort of system that acknowledges the primacy of parties, instead of denying them wholesale, is probably way healthier for democracy in the long run.* Media pundits and DC analysts learned the wrong lesson from 2024. Masket surveyed hundreds of Democratic county chairs after the election and found the single most common explanation for Harris’s loss was inflation and anti-incumbent backlash. He thinks that’s roughly right — and notes there is little the party could have done to avoid it. Joe Biden’s stimulus, labor support, and broadly effective economic policy yielded him “roughly nothing in terms of politics.” Elliott’s working theory for what actually moves voters is that highly visible, durable empathy with working-class people can buy an incumbent party that is presiding over economic stress some clout with voters, such as the case of Zohran Mamdani in NYC and Taylor Rehmet in Texas’ 9th state seat district. This is an are both agree the parties and policymakers are having trouble figuring out.Thanks again to Seth for joining this second Deep Dive version of the show. It was a lot of fun, and I (Elliott) personally learned a lot!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 the podcast, the newsletter, and the time it takes to do this kind of analysis well. 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 reminder: Elliott and David Nir record the usual Strength In Numbers podcast live every Thursday at 2:00 PM Eastern. We always discuss a few pre-planned topics and then answer questions submitted live by viewers.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: 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
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  What the SCOTUS VRA decision means for the midterms — and the future 30.04.2026 49min

  On this week's Strength In Numbers podcast, Elliott and David unpack the Supreme Court's decision in Louisiana v. Callais and explain what it means for the midterms and beyond. Then Elliott pushes back on a trendy take that Democrats' "only" 7–8 point generic ballot lead, despite Trump's –22 net approval, proves the party is fundamentally misaligned with voters on cultural issues. Here are the big takeaways:* Republicans could redraw ~10-15 seats because of the Callais decision. Plaintiffs in racial gerrymandering cases now have to prove intentional discrimination, which is nearly impossible since states can just say they drew maps for partisan reasons. Eight Southern states hold at least a dozen VRA-protected districts that Republicans can now dismantle, with Louisiana already racing to redraw its map before 2026.* The U.S. is increasingly governed by minority rule, and Callais is the latest symptom. Democrats have won the effective popular vote for the Senate in every cycle but one since 1992, yet two popular-vote-losing presidents went on to stack the Court with justices confirmed by a minority-elected Senate that have decided cases decisively against the popular majority on dozens of key cases. That Court just trashed legislation 67% of voters say is still needed — and 65% of voters now support Supreme Court term limits.* The “Democrats should be up 20 points” narrative is built on a misunderstanding of the data, and the claimed cause (crime and social issues) is wrong. Our investigation of the Trump disapprovers in the Strength In Numbers poll finds that most disapprovers who have not committed to voting Democratic on the generic ballot are in fact “closeted partisans” — voters who say they identify as Republicans and are strong conservatives. Accounting for that, the realistic ceiling for Democrats is around D+13, not D+20; treating every Trump disapprover as a winnable Democratic vote is a misread of the data. Additionally: only 3% of persuadable Trump-disapprovers name crime as their top issue, while 66% cite the economy, prices, or health care — and most say they don’t even know which party to trust on those issues. 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 the podcast, the newsletter, and the time it takes to do this kind of analysis well. 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. We record the podcast live every Thursday at 2:00 PM Eastern. We always discuss a few pre-planned topics and then answer questions submitted live by viewers.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
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  Voters rate the Democrats poorly — but are voting for them anyway 23.04.2026 1h 15min

  In this week’s first-ever live, in-person recording of the Strength In Numbers podcast — at the America Votes State Summit in Washington, D.C. — G. Elliott Morris and David Nir debut exclusive new polling on the midterms, dig into what voters actually dislike about the Democratic Party, and explain why none of this changes the trajectory of a brutal midterm for Republicans (even though it could matter for 2028 and beyond).Here are the big takeaways:* Trump’s numbers keep getting worse, and Democrats hold a commanding generic ballot lead. Our April Strength in Numbers/Verasight survey finds Trump’s approval at an all-time low of 35% and Democrats ahead in the generic ballot by 7 points. Combined with special election overperformances averaging D+13 and the historical pattern of the out-party gaining roughly 5 more points on the generic ballot between April and November, Elliott and David argue Democrats are overwhelmingly favored to retake the House, with the Senate a genuine toss-up.* Yet the Democratic brand is at a historic low. The Democratic Party’s net favorability is the worst it’s been since the post-9/11 rally for Republicans. Our poll asks voters to name, in their own words, something the Democrats have done recently that they dislike. Across party lines, they call Democrats “weak,” criticize their leadership, and say they lack a clear message. Nearly half of all Democrats cited one of two things—the party’s perceived weakness against Trump and caving to Republicans on the recent government shutdowns—as their top issue with the party.* But electoral implications are mixed. Historically, there’s zero correlation between party favorability ratings a year before the midterms and actual electoral performance. In 2014, Democrats had a huge favorability advantage and got destroyed. And in this poll, only 1% of self-identified Democrats say they’re so unhappy they won’t vote, while 31% say they’ll vote Democratic despite being dissatisfied with the party.* And swing voters don’t want Democrats to generically “moderate” their brand — they want someone who gets them. When we asked U.S. adults in open-ended questions last November what they want from a political party, roughly half of Americans expressed generic criticism of both political parties, said that everyday economic life was getting too expensive, or wanted greater support for social programs like Medicare and Social Security. Most voters just want a party that has a plan to make everyday life less of a struggle.* Capitulation is not a strategy—and it exacerbates the Democrats’ brand issues. When Democrats leaned into opposition to mass deportations in the spring and summer of 2025, Trump’s numbers on immigration dropped sharply — and so did the GOP’s favorability advantage. The biggest risk for Democrats isn’t being perceived as extreme (our data show it’s Republicans who get docked by voters on this front), it’s failing to show everyday Americans that it cares about them and will fight for them.One note if you’re watching the video recording: a technical glitch on our end caused the video of this recording to freeze at around the one-hour mark, but you can still hear the audio throughout the podcast. The video feed will resume after a few minutes.If you missed our video livestream, you can watch it by clicking play on the web version of this post at gelliottmorris.com. We record the podcast live every Thursday at 2:00 PM Eastern. We always discuss a few pre-planned topics and then answer questions submitted live by viewers.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