A New Kind Of Undecided Voter
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So, how's everyone doing? I'm really excited to visit Tyra Banks' ice cream shop this weekend. The Smizing Dream in Washington, D.C.? The very same, Galen. Does everyone know what smizing is? Yeah, yes. I'm doing it right now. Try a little bit harder, a little bit harder. Smile a little bit more with those eyes. Okay, now you look like a murderer.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. And folks, we are two weeks away from Election Day and the polar coaster has entered a barrel roll. As we sit down to record in the FiveThirtyEight averages, Harris leads nationally by two percentage points. In Wisconsin, the polls are even. In Michigan, even. In Pennsylvania, also even.

In Nevada, even, and in North Carolina, stop me if you've heard this one before, but even. In Georgia and Arizona, Trump leads by two percentage points each. And today we're going to do an update on where the polls stand. And yes, I will also ask if Republican pollsters are flooding the zone. If you don't know what that means, bless you, you have more important things to be doing. And I appreciate that.

We will get into it nonetheless. We're also going to consider who the swing voters or undecided voters are in 2024. How are they different from past elections and have the campaigns and media appropriately updated their priors after decades of talking about suburban women?

And for any of you who joined us on our podcast road trip last week and thought, wait a second, why didn't they go to Nebraska for that surprisingly close Senate race? My answer is, I don't know. It would have messed up our plan to take the ferry to Alaska or something like that. Anyway, fear not. We are parachuting into the Cornhusker State Airport.

today. And here with me to do it all is senior researcher Mary Radcliffe. Welcome to the podcast, Mary. Good morning, Galen. Also here with us is senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich. Welcome, Nathaniel. Hey, Galen. By the way, some housekeeping before we dive in this morning.

This week and next week, we are going to have three podcast episodes per week. Yes, three instead of two. So check back in on your feed more often. We're ramping up to cover the election. Happy election season. Also, send us your questions. Many of you already do at podcasts at 538.com. But if you have any questions that you would like us to answer in a mailbag segment over these next two weeks, please, you can find me on Twitter or again at podcasts at 538.com.

Okay, so the polls. I mentioned the state of the polls at the top, and I think that the trend of the polls moving slightly in Trump's favor is a little clearer than when we recorded last week. We've also gotten more polls from Republican pollsters or sponsors over the past couple weeks, and this has led to some accusations that partisan pollsters are trying to flood the zone, a.k.a. publish a bunch of polls, to make it look like Trump himself.

has momentum. Mary, is that the case? Well, I can't speak to the motivation of various pollsters.

I think there's a question here of how you want to define what a partisan pollster is, because I think there's some organizations that when concerns are raised about this issue, people bucket as partisan that 538 doesn't technically count as partisan, according to our definition. So for us, an organization only counts as partisan if it explicitly spends money or endorses candidates of a particular party.

A lot of these organizations would not technically be counted as partisan. But just to get a sense of it, I did run some numbers.

All the polls that have entered our database since October, there's 387 total polls. 19 of them are affiliated with Democrats and 50 are affiliated with Republicans in some way officially. So there is a little bit more Republican polling out there. However, our colleague Elliot Morris looked at this last week, and there's a piece up on the site you can go look at now, where he used sort of a more expansive definition of like

who's these people flooding the zone. We looked at folks that were releasing a lot of polls that had either a very low pollster rating or no pollster rating at all. And just

threw them out, right? Like, what would have happened if we just ignored those polls and did our polling averages without them? And it didn't really make all that much of a difference. On average, it changed the polling averages by 0.3 percentage points in Harris's favor. But as you mentioned, Galen, all the polling averages are tied. So a 0.3 percentage point change probably isn't going to make a significant difference in most of these states.

Right. And I would definitely emphasize that on a daily basis, just normal noise in the polls, our averages in a given state will change by like 0.3. So it's really not a degree of change that you should be paying much attention to. Bear in mind, again, people who are listening to this podcast probably know this, but the average error in presidential election polls is four points. So we really shouldn't be sweating differences of 0.3 points, even if maybe it happened

happens to be a difference of like Harris being up by 0.2 versus Trump being up by 0.1. In those cases, even our polling averages still have a margin of error and you should still be, as Galen was saying, kind of mentally rounding those to a tie.

A slightly different question here, which is we aren't necessarily seeing a difference from one poll to the next of a percentage point or two. We're actually seeing quite a bit of disagreement. I mean, just this morning, some Washington Post polling out showed

Harris leading by six percentage points in Georgia, while Trump was leading by six percentage points in Arizona. And also some variation across the upper Midwest, like Harris leading in Wisconsin by a healthy clip and Trump leading in Michigan. So I'm curious if there's any trends that we're seeing in terms of

of the polls disagreeing? Like, is it the high quality polls are showing one thing and the low quality polls are showing something else? What should we make of all this variation, Mary?

This is a really interesting cycle. I think we're actually seeing a lot of variance within individual pollsters, actually. It seems like a number of high-quality individual pollsters have been kind of noisy this year. You look at Quinnipiac, which has just like huge swings from one side to the other between surveys of the same state.

It feels like every poll and every pollster is kind of just like one big shrug emoji right now. It's hard to discern these kinds of trends within each pollster.

Yeah, and I want to emphasize, again, that this is normal, right? You should be seeing this. If the truth of the race is that it is tied, you are going to get a handful of Harris plus four polls, and you're going to get a handful of Trump plus four polls, and that's normal. What's concerning, actually, is that every single pollster came out with something showing a tied race, because that wouldn't be a normal distribution when you are just kind of taking theoretically random samples, and that would suggest something like

pollsters putting the thumb on the scale, hurting to kind of conform to the averages. But thankfully, that's not what we're seeing for the most part. And there's also the possibility that some of these polls are getting an accurate picture or a more accurate picture than others, and it's not truly tied. So we should just keep that in mind as well.

You know, as an ending note here, I mentioned that we're fully strapped in to the polar coaster at this point. And I joke that there's a point in every election cycle where I go from being political analyst, reporter, whatever, to becoming a therapist in a sense. And I'm curious, I have my own advice that I give people. But at this point, two weeks out from Election Day, when nerves are running high, I'm

What advice do you have to people when consuming the polls? I mean, I fully acknowledge that it is difficult for an election that a lot of people view as existential to kind of take a step back and try to think about other things. But I think that is the best advice that I have for people.

we at FiveThirtyEight have polling averages just so that people don't have to obsess over every single movement and every single poll and kind of have these heart attacks of like, oh, Quinnipiac is great now for my team. Oh, wait, now it's terrible. Oh, my gosh. Like that obviously is the kind of thing that isn't healthy, especially when those fluctuations are natural and aren't necessarily reflecting true changes in the race. So I would recommend that people try to spend time with

friends and family or doing the hobbies that you like doing, check in on the 538 polling averages, maybe once or twice a week, because that's the kind of pace that if... No, constantly, constantly, Nathaniel. All day long, just refresh, refresh, refresh. I hope our bosses aren't listening to this, but don't do that, actually. It's healthier to not. If there is a trend in the race,

It won't show up on a daily basis. You have to wait at least a few days in order for that to really manifest itself. And that's the kind of thing that maybe you should be worried about and maybe is theoretically actionable if you want to go out and phone Ben Carter or something for your team. Taking a broader view, 30,000 foot view of the race, that is the healthier thing at this point.

I mean, if you really, if you can't limit yourself to once or twice a week, I would recommend this. Please call 1-800. This is my real recommendation. The forecast update that includes all the polls that were released in the morning every day generally goes up on the site around 1230 or one o'clock. If you want a time where you can just check in and say, all right, this has got all the new stuff from this morning. You just check in on your lunch hour and then put it away.

I appreciate that, Mary. I have a slightly more woo-woo answer to this question, which is, so in my 20s, believe it or not, I started losing my hair and I was nervous. I was worried, am I going bald? Am I going bald? And a friend said to me, if you're worried about it, you have to just face your fear and shave your head, right? And then you'll see that

Whether it's terrible or whatever it is, the uncertainty will be gone and you will know what it's like to be bald. So weirdly enough, that's what I tell people when they ask me about this is whatever you don't want to happen in this election, imagine that it's November 6th and the outcome you don't want has happened.

How will your life be different? What will you do differently? And if you start to think, if you have a lot of election anxiety, polling anxiety, put it into thinking about what you might do if the outcome that you don't want comes to pass. Maybe you'll spend time with friends, family, and loved ones. Maybe you will do things differently than you do now, like getting engaged in politics or whatever else it may be, taking up a new hobby to pass your time. Because the reality is that

For the most part, every individual listening to this podcast will not be able to control the outcome of this election. And so putting that energy and anxiety into something maybe more productive would be my advice from your balding friend. Did you shave your head? No, folks. I did not take my own advice.

But I still have my hair. I still have my hair. All right. With that, let's move on and talk about swing voters. But first, a break. Today's podcast is brought to you by Calm. Have you had difficulty focusing lately? Things like parenting pressures, work challenges, school commitments, or say maybe an election can wreak havoc on your ability to stay focused and productive.

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For decades, when pundits and even candidates talked about swing voters, they often talked about suburban women or soccer moms. In fact, we did a whole podcast episode about that trope in the spring if you want to go check it out. Here's a clip. Pamela Wilk is a so-called soccer mom, white suburban women busy with kids and often jobs who could be the decisive voters in this election.

Wilk believes that Clinton, more than Dole, shares her view of how Washington can help. You gotta love archival tape. But the reality is that those voters that that reporter is talking about have grown increasingly Democratic in the Trump era. So who are the swing voters now? Have the campaigns updated their priors?

And how does this impact their decisions in the final few weeks of the campaign? So first off, I want to get a sense of the universe that we're talking about. According to an Axios article last week based on a Pew report, quote, just 13% of voters are up for grabs ahead of the presidential election.

Now, that 13% number is based on the Pew report suggesting that 82% of voters are certain about their choices, 13% have some form of lean or preference, and 5% support a non-Trump or Harris candidate. So many good or bad use of polling here. Is it a good use of polling to say that 13% of voters are up for grabs ahead of this presidential election, Mary?

I mean, I'm a little skeptical about including the lean voters in the up for grabs category. I think voters that say they lean toward a candidate are most likely to pick that candidate. Other than that, I think it's fine. But this number stuck out to me in particular, because if you look at 538's national polling average, you see that if you add up Harris and Trump's number together, you get something like 95 percent of voters accounted for.

And so that means that there's 5% of people out there who truly do not know that even when pushed, you know, withhold supporting one candidate or the other or are supporting a third party candidate. So on one hand, you have maybe like 13% of people seem persuadable in one direction or another in some polls. But if you just go off of our average, it seems like the universe looks more like 5%. Nathaniel, are you persuaded more by the 5% or the 13%?

I would guess that it is closer to the 5%. But I think that is why it's kind of a bad use of polling, right? I don't think you can put that precise of a number on it for a lot of the reasons that Mary says. I think, first of all, obviously, different polls are going to find different numbers of undecided people. I think that...

There is a question about who is truly undecided, the people who tell pollsters they're undecided. But I also think there are probably a group of people who may be, I think this is especially true in the wake of certain events that maybe at this particular moment were not at that point. But let's say after Harris jumped in the race and she was having her kind of honeymoon period.

back to the first debate when Biden was struggling, there might be people who are saying, oh, I'm supporting Harris or I'm supporting Trump during that time who are actually persuadable and might genuinely flip back. I'm not as skeptical of the lean. I agree with Mary that

That statistically or empirically, most people who say they lean with one candidate end up supporting that candidate, but not all of them. So I don't think that you should exclude them entirely from the still making up their mind universe. And so I think that's why it's just very difficult to come up with a number. So generally, when I talk about it, I say somewhere between 5% and 10% of people are going to decide the selection one way or the other.

In 2020, the third party vote share was under 2%. If we're trying to imagine how much of that like 5% is undecided, but we'll end up going for Trump or Harris, or if it's even larger than 5%. Are we thinking that it's something similar this time around? Or are we thinking more like 2016 when it was what 6%? I would expect that the third party vote share will be closer to 2020 than 2016.

In 2016, we had sort of a unique situation with just like two deeply unpopular candidates at the top of the ticket. And we're not in exactly the same position now. Not to say that either Harris or Trump is particularly popular, but their numbers are not as bad. Like Harris's numbers are nowhere near as bad as Hillary Clinton's were. I suspect that we will have fewer of those double-hater third-party voters.

Who are we talking about here when we talk about undecided or swing voters today? I suggested that this soccer mom trope is probably outdated. So who are we talking about?

Mostly, the undecided voters that we see in polls now are the kind of voters that are paying a little bit less attention to political news and politics, which generally includes younger voters and in particular young voters of color.

Also, it looks like, according to the New York Times polling data, they tend to be a bit more male. They tend to be more moderate. I think that's probably not all that surprising, because if they were liberal or conservative, it might be obvious who they would be.

supporting. When we take that picture, younger, a little bit more male, more likely to be a voter of color, more moderate and not plugged in to traditional media, and in particular, traditional political media. I mean, how does a voter like that make up their mind? How does a campaign try to engage a voter like that?

I mean, I think we don't know exactly how a voter like that makes up their mind because otherwise it'd be easier to reach them. But I think this is why, obviously, you've seen in the absence, frankly, of real political news off the campaign trail, we have seen a lot of focus on candidates voting.

to reach voters in unorthodox ways, like Kamala Harris going on Call Her Daddy and the potential Joe Rogan interview that people were talking about her doing. I think there has been a lot of discussion about those things because obviously those are not primarily political podcasts. And like in the case of Joe Rogan, for example, it's talking to basically exactly this kind of disproportionately male audience

kind of unengaged in politics audience. And so the candidates are hoping that that's the way that they can reach out to those people. But we don't really know. And we won't know until after the election if we ever do. Yeah, I think you see Harris doing a lot of non-traditional media. And Trump has done some of that, too. He's also gone on a number of podcasts.

But I think you're also seeing from Trump sort of a lean into kind of memeable events, stuff that can be shared on social media, like pictures of him working at McDonald's or the crowd chanting USA when he shows up at a Pittsburgh Steelers football game. There's attempts to

to sort of get around traditional media and into people's feeds in other ways. Yeah, one actually particularly creative, I thought, way of doing this, I saw an article in the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago about Harris buying ads on a particular gaming site. I am not a gamer, so I forget the name of the site. Sorry. It was like...

a couple of video ads, digital video ads, and also some static ads that like made it look, they were like designed in like kind of like a gamey way. Like it had the kind of like, almost like Game Boy or like Nintendo graphics, but it was like both for Kamala Harris or whatever. And I thought that was kind of clever, again, kind of going to the fact that

Gamers tend to be younger, more male. This type of demographic that I think the campaigns have rightly decided is where some persuasion efforts might actually make a difference.

I just want to clarify something here. When we're talking about undecided voters, is that something distinct from swing voters? To give you an example, right? The New York Times Sienna polling showed Trump leading Harris with young men 58% to 37%. Now, of course, this is a small sample, but that would be a significant flip from 2020 when exit polls found Biden leading Trump by 11 points with young men.

young men. So from the campaign's perspective, are young men a group of swing voters who have already swung? Or do undecideds and swing voters oftentimes overlap in the Venn diagram?

They are related, but not exactly the same. If you're a voter who has swung, you theoretically have the capacity to swing back in a way that is more likely than if you were a Biden voter in 2020 and are a Harris voter this time. But yeah, a lot of those people may be decided. And I think it is more instructive to look at groups for whom the undecided share is higher. I think it is a fallacy to think that the...

swing groups or like the undecided groups that they should be targeting are the ones that are kind of closer to 50-50 in the polls. Because I think actually what you want to look at is the share of undecideds, right? It's like you have a group that is maybe 70% to 10% for Democrats, but they're 20% undecided. That's a Democratic-leaning group. It's not something you would normally call a swing group. But like the fact that they're 20% undecided means that that's kind of a soft target, I think, for both campaigns.

I think this is why a lot of the talk about the soccer moms and the suburban women was always, even at the time, kind of misleading because a lot of those people have made up their mind. Suburban women and soccer moms are a huge group, some of whom are hardcore

liberals, even in the 90s. Some of them were hardcore Republicans and still are to this day. But the question is, there are some people in the middle who are genuinely persuadable. And I think you have to look at which groups demographically are disproportionately undecided rather than hovering around this 50-50 mark. Yeah. And almost to exactly your point, it looks like those groups are similar. When you look at who is overrepresented in the undecided group, younger men show up at a higher rate. And

And I'll also say when asked about the things that they care about, it's interesting, you know, again, this probably gets to the same point that we've already made, but they don't care nearly as much about climate or abortion as Democrats say they do. They also don't care nearly as much about the border as Republicans say they do. Their top concern is inflation and

and the economy, which is everyone's top concern, but also disproportionately so. And so it's really a message about the economy, which brings us to the final point I want to get to in this segment, which is how the candidates are campaigning in the final stretch. You all mentioned that at least in part, they are campaigning towards that undecided or swing voter through non-traditional media routes. But it also seems like

Like the message they are delivering more broadly may be changing. So I want to play a couple clips here. And the first is from Harris. It is clear Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged. And he is seeking unchecked power.

That quote is from an event with over 100 Republicans who now support Harris. And I think...

I think we could say that that sounds a lot less like the happy warrior rhetoric of August, the joy, the freedom, and a little bit more like Biden's threat to democracy rhetoric that was what he ran on in 2020 and was a core part of his reelection campaign before he dropped out. Why do you think Harris might be making this rhetorical shift?

As a campaign, you have to do two things. You have to get people to say they're going to vote for you and you have to get people to vote. We're sort of shifting maybe into the get out the vote portion of the campaign where Harris needs all those folks that are concerned about

this specific sort of issue, Donald Trump's fitness for office and his behavior, those kinds of issues. She needs those voters to go actually vote. They say they want to vote for her. Now she wants them to do it. And she said this line, I think, because she wanted to put it in an ad. I have seen it on TV. All right. There's our Pennsylvania voter.

Yeah, I think especially as the way that the country votes has changed, more and more people are voting early and by mail. You see the kind of traditional turnout, get out the vote portion of the campaign come earlier and earlier, right? Once upon a time, it would be just in the days before the election when people would really try to drive their base out to the polls. And now voting is open in most states currently as we speak. And so, yeah,

they are trying to get people out to the polls now to vote. And so, yeah, I think maybe you're seeing a shift from the persuasion messaging to the turnout messaging. That said, I would also point out that like the vast majority of what most Americans hear from the campaigns, or at least swing state Americans, isn't necessarily what they're saying on the stump because people aren't necessarily paying that close attention to the news. It is actually what

is in the ads, right? And so a lot of the paid advertising messaging, as far as I know, has not changed. And so I think obviously campaigns are capable of airing ads, trying to convince people that the other side is evil and people they should vote for themselves, and also take a more, hey, get out to the polls attitude in their personal campaigning.

Yeah, I mean, speaking of saying that the other side is evil, Trump's rhetoric has gotten quite intense as of late. I mean, it always has been. But here's a quote from Fox where he's talking about Democrats, for example.

We have two enemies. We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within. And the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries because... He also recently called Democrats evil and accused them of weaponizing our election a couple weeks ago. He proposed, quote, one really violent day as a solution to property crime in American cities.

I think we oftentimes don't think of the Trump campaign as being as disciplined or self-evidently strategic as other more traditional political campaigns. But he clearly knows what he's doing politically when he speaks. What should we make of what he's saying here?

I mean, I do think there is an element of Donald Trump speaks from his id. And I think you're right that there have been a lot of particularly dark comments lately, but they're also not that new from Donald Trump. He has said similar things in the past.

Some of it is probably just him saying what he wants to say and probably the intensity of the campaign and the stress, frankly, getting to him as well. Right. It affects all of us. It affects people who watch the polls, it affects journalists, it affects the people in the campaigns themselves. And, you know, as the election gets closer, the stakes seem to get higher and that maybe leads to an increase in the polls.

rhetoric as well. But to the extent that it is a deliberate choice, I think it's a lot of the same stuff goes, which is that they are trying to motivate their base to vote, a base that in many ways I think is overall a lower propensity base, right, than the Democratic base, and that if the campaigns weren't doing any get-out-the-vote stuff, I think Republicans would have a harder time getting out than Democrats who seem perfectly motivated on their own, based on special election results and stuff like that.

I totally agree with you, Nathaniel. I think that this is Trump speaking, not the Trump campaign speaking, right? Like I haven't seen this show up in a political ad during the football game like I have with the kinds of shifts in messaging we're seeing from Harris. I hear what you're saying, Galen, though, you know, at the media at times, ourselves included, sometimes don't take Trump seriously because of this lack of discipline or

Or we see a lack of discipline when actually there is something strategic going on. But I think if there was a real strategic push here, we would be seeing it in paid ads and we're not. All right. Well, let's move on and talk about that overlooked Nebraska Senate race. But first, a break.

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We carelessly drove right past Nebraska on our road trip last week, so today we're going to parachute in because independent Senate candidate Dan Osborne is running pretty close to Republican incumbent Senator Deb Fischer in a state that Trump won by nearly 20 percentage points. According to our 538 averages, Fischer leads Osborne in the polls by just one point, with 44% of the vote compared to Osborne's 43%. So...

Mary, how vulnerable is this seat for Republicans? It's a little unclear because, you know, we've got that polling average which says this is the closest Senate race in the country right now. But if you take a little deeper look, every single poll of this race that was conducted in October is an internal campaign poll for one of the two candidates. There are five of those in October. You have to go back to September 27th

to get a nonpartisan poll of the race. There have only been, I believe, two nonpartisan polls of this race.

So it's pretty tough to get a clear picture of what's going on based on a pile of internal campaign polls. That being said, I would suspect that the undecided voters, which I mean, if you think about the numbers you mentioned, it's 44 to 43. There's a pretty significant undecided vote in that tally. And in a state like Nebraska, I would suspect that those undecided voters ultimately probably lean towards Fisher. Yeah.

The Republican, correct. Yeah, exactly. Like Donald Trump is going to win Nebraska with, you know, 55, 60% of the vote. And so at the end of the day, I think a lot of those undecided voters are Trump voters. And that doesn't necessarily mean they'll vote for Deb Fischer. You know, there's a lot of throw the bums out, drain the swamp.

sentiment, but they are probably more inclined to vote for the Republican candidate than for the independent Dan Osborne. To put some numbers on what Mary said, if you look at some of our other polling averages, the other closest ones in Ohio, the race is 48 to 46 percent. So again, those numbers are higher, a lot fewer undecided voters in that partisan race. In Texas,

49% to 45%. In Michigan, it is 48% to 44%. So again, when those partisan labels are there, voters are more likely to know who they're voting for. And so it creates this opportunity for Osborne, the fact that he's an independent and maybe people don't know what to make of him. But

I think this is a real example where you have to look at the raw numbers of the polling averages and not just the margin. I think it may be close in the end, but I think this is a good example of where likelihood of winning isn't a one-to-one comparison with margin. I would personally say that Fisher is still a pretty heavy favorite in this race.

Yeah, I mean, to your point about frustrating partisanship, Osborne has said that he's not accepting any endorsements from any political party or politician in the

this race. When you look at Nebraska's partisanship overall, according to Pew Research data, 17% of adults do not identify with any party, 47% identify as Republican or lean Republican, and 36% identify as Democrat or lean Democrat. I think taking that all together

What should we make of the fact that this race is close? You know, given that folks may not know exactly what partisanship is attached to Osborne, but people certainly know how they themselves feel. And one of them is clearly a Republican.

Again, Osborne's support is fairly low. He's only a little bit above where Biden was in the state in 2020 by 139% of the vote in Nebraska. Osborne is hovering around 43%. And again, there's no guarantee that it will go that much higher once those undecided voters are allocated. But again, it makes sense when you have an independent option who maybe says a few conservative things. And again, they're

is a general anti-incumbent attitude out there across the whole country, even the whole world, as we've talked about in other elections. And so I think that it shows that it's probably clever for the kind of minor party to step aside and let

a friendly independent take the mantle in some of these deep red or deep blue states. We've seen it before with Evan McMullin in Utah last cycle. We saw it with Greg Orman in 2014 in Kansas, which is, I think, the race that this one gets compared to a lot. That's a race where Orman, the independent candidate, was leading in the polls going into the election, but then Republicans ended up holding that seat. And so I think a lot of people kind of

view that as a cautionary tale for Osborne, both because the polls ended up having a significant error in that race and because undecided voters really flocked toward the Republican candidate in the end. But I don't think it is that surprising that the race is close even two weeks before Election Day in the polls. If we come back after Election Day and it turns out that Osborne has won, I think they'll probably be a little bit more

interesting things to talk about there. But if it ends up being 55-45 for Fisher, which is kind of my mental model for this race, I think it's perfectly compatible with our notion of Nebraska as a red state. It'll come home to Republicans in the end when you don't have a Democrat running and maybe you can get some of these throw-the-bums-out voters to go along for the ride, but it's hard to get above that 50% threshold. Yeah, I think, you know, when you're looking at the polls in a race like this,

And what voters are thinking when they look at that poll is, oh, I don't I'm not sure because I don't know what this independence stands for. I'm going to have to look that up. But they're not actually probably going to look up a lot of information about Osborne before they vote. A lot of folks are going to go into the polls and say, oh, shoot, I was supposed to look that guy up. Well, I guess I just vote for the Republican. That's the kind of thing we've seen in the past. Yeah. Yeah. And

if folks were to look up Osborne's policies, what they would find is that he is conservative on issues surrounding the border and gun ownership and liberal on issues like abortion and organized labor, which is, you know, basically the popular position on all of those things. And he also has to his advantage that Deb Fischer is, uh,

one of the top 10 least popular senators. According to Morning Consult, she's number eight on that list. So you put all that together and you get a slightly closer race than you might otherwise have. I think we're going to leave it there for today. So thank you so much, Nathaniel and Mary, for joining me today. Thanks, Galen. Thanks, Galen.

My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Chertavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or a review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you soon.