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I used to work for a travel guide. Oh, that's right. That's right. Yeah. Nathaniel, how does it feel to have had the best journalism job in the world, which is travel journalism, and to have ended up somewhere near the bottom of the pack covering just some of the most brutal elections? Don't worry. After this election, it's going back to travel writing. Yeah.
Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk, and by this time next week, we're going to have a lot more information about the contours of the 2024 presidential election. For one, former President Trump's campaign says that we will know who Trump's running mate will be by next Monday.
But also, lawmakers are returning to Washington this week after their 4th of July break, and senators will be meeting for the first time since that debate that changed everything. Calls for Biden to step down from lawmakers, donors, and voters, if you look at the polls, have continued since we last checked in on Wednesday. But Biden has said in interviews and on the stump that he will not get out, and he sent a letter to Democratic lawmakers this morning saying as much.
He's also pointing to a NATO conference in Washington this week as another opportunity to judge his fitness for a second term. It does not seem like the interested parties have taken Biden's insistence as the final word, at least not yet. So how messy will things get and how will it all end?
And we've got a good or bad use of polling example for you. It's based on the British and French elections, in which left-wing parties did notably well. In Britain, it was an expected victory for Labour, with the worst performance for Conservatives in the history of the party. And in France, it was an upset in which an alliance of left-wing parties won the most seats of any party, with Macron's centrist coming in second, and the expected victor, France's far-right National Rally, coming in third.
Here with me to discuss it all is senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich. Hey, Nathaniel. Hey, Galen. How are you? You know, doing pretty well. Easing back into what I expect to be a pretty crazy week.
Also here with us is senior elections analyst Jeffrey Skelly. Hey, Jeffrey. Happy Monday, Galen. This could be a nutty week. You can say that again. So we've got a lot to discuss, but I want to slip in a good or bad use of polling example before we dive into discussions about Biden. So the past few days were actually pretty big for election watchers in Britain and France, as I mentioned, but also in Iran, where the reform candidate beat the ultra-conservative candidate
for president. In any case, if you watched the British or French election results, you might have noticed that they treat the exit polls quite differently than we do in the U.S. At the exact moment that voting ends, there's a countdown on TV and the results of the exit polls are shown on screen with parliamentary seats apportioned according to the results of the poll. The
That is sort of the blockbuster moment of the evening. And from an American perspective, it maybe seems risky to put so much weight on an exit poll. But in fact, there's a long history of highly accurate exit polls, at least over there. In the U.S., we do not share top line results of exit polls in a similar fashion on election night. And there is, in fact, a long history of, I don't know, quals.
Quite inaccurate exit poll results, 2004 and 2016 being good examples. So here's the question for you all. Is the European treatment of exit polls a good or bad use of polling, Geoffrey?
I think it's a good use of polling, at least in the UK example, because they actually use a somewhat different approach to how they do exit polls, which is part of why they've perhaps been more successful recently. Apparently what they do is that instead of just trying to get
a representative sample of precincts or voting places across constituencies, I guess is the word they use over there. What they do is they want a representative sample, but what they actually do is instead of sort of the exit poll being a one-off, they compare it to how it voted in the last election as sort of a fundamental, trying to get a fundamental understanding of how maybe the vote has shifted.
So they're looking at, I guess in this case, 2019 results in the same place, right? And using that as like a jumping off point for comparison. And we obviously do a lot of our electoral analysis that way, but it's not necessarily the case that the exit polls do that.
So they're actually doing the job of like Steve Kornacki on election night, where you're going from sort of one place in a state that has all the vote in and being like, OK, this is how much it shifted. It needed. These are the benchmarks it needed to shift and not to just single out Steve Kornacki. Jeff, you also do this on election night.
Just not with khakis on, you know. Just not with khakis on, yeah. Okay, interesting. So they're doing that work. You say good use of polling. Yeah, and I think it's also worth noting that one of the other challenges here is that the UK and France, the way like they report election results, the way their election results are brought together, I believe is a top-down system, a national election body that deals with the results. Whereas we have a federal system with 50 states and Washington, D.C.,
So you have 51 different entities counting and you have different rules in each state. We also have six time zones, which kind of makes the whole thing of like, as soon as the polls close, here's the result. That becomes basically impossible because if we waited for Hawaii at the end of the day, then
we would already know all the results in the rest of the country, basically. That's a good point. So kind of no matter what, we wouldn't have that blockbuster moment. But Nathaniel, where do you come down on the good or bad use of polling question? So I am going to go ahead and say this is a bad use of polling. I'm pretty radically anti-exit poll in general. Now, I will say that I completely agree with everything that Jeffrey said, like
He's right about the methodology and stuff like that. And I do think that exit polls in the UK and France are a better use of polling than here in the US.
But I still just am not super comfortable with the way that they are used and kind of the level of precision that they falsely confer. The way that it works, at least in the UK, is that they say when polls close, like, oh, this is how many seats we're projecting labor to get, conservatives to get, reform to get, etc. And
Those are like down to the exact number of seats. And that is like, just not a level of precision that a poll, which is ultimately what this is can get for you. So, and this of course can also impact the narratives.
I was watching the coverage of Sky News of the UK election, and after the polls closed, the exit poll said that the Reform Party, which is the party that is led by Nigel Farage, the kind of pro-Brexit far-right guy over there, it said that they had won 13 seats in Parliament. And so they had a guy from the Reform Party on, and they interviewed him, and they were like, you got 13 seats. How do you feel about that? And that kind of set the tone for a lot of the coverage for the rest of the night.
as things went on and they ended up revising the exit polls, A, and then B, counting all the votes, it turned out that reform only won five seats. And like that difference between 13 and five seats, like statistically, that's like within an acceptable range, right? That's like pretty accurate in the right ballpark. But in terms of the narrative, that's
pretty different, but it was too late at that point where there had already been this narrative about like the strength of reform and stuff like that, which I think is fair given that they did have a large increase in the popular vote. But still, like that kind of level of precision in the coverage really kind of made me uncomfortable, especially when it is election night. This isn't like three weeks before the election when polls are useful and people want to know who's going to win. Just wait a few hours. People are going to get concrete results anyway.
I just generally think exit polls are not a useful part of election night reporting. Here in the U.S., as you mentioned, Galen, they lead people to make extrapolations that aren't good. They should just release exit polls a couple days later once they're weighted to the final result so people can dig into the crosstabs and stuff like that.
And in Europe, like, I just think people should wait. And I just, I worry about confusing the casual viewer who is just tuning in and seeing at, you know, two minutes after polls close, oh, reform won this many seats, labor won this many seats. And then later on, when it turns out those numbers are in the same ballpark, but the exact numbers are a bit inaccurate, maybe that confuses people. Maybe that introduces distrust in the system. And so, yeah, I just think it's better to wait for the real results. Yeah.
To Nathaniel's point about waiting for results, there was conversation after the 1980 election that I think is interesting, that there were bills proposed that would have made it basically impossible to share election results until all polls had closed. Oh, in the United States. In the United States. That's so interesting. Yes. Because there were complaints, especially, I think, among some Democrats that Reagan, basically, they were like, oh, he's won before polls had closed, even in California. And so...
There was a bill that would have barred any person from making public any information regarding the number of votes cast until all polls had closed. And a similar bill would have prohibited broadcasters from announcing election results or projections until all the polls had closed. Those bills were never enacted. So talk about a different media environment. That's super interesting. In any case, let's move on and talk about what happens next for President Biden. But first, a break.
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When we last discussed Biden's predicament on Wednesday, just one Democratic lawmaker had called on Joe Biden to step aside in the 2024 election. That was Lloyd Doggett from Texas.
Now, it's five lawmakers who have publicly called for Biden to step aside. Another four lawmakers reportedly said in a call that they oppose Biden as the nominee, and that reporting came out yesterday on Sunday. And then another handful of lawmakers who have expressed skepticism and concern. So somewhere in the range of a dozen lawmakers either saying explicitly or hinting at Biden ought to get out.
The pressure amongst donors has also continued to grow. So various influential donors have said they will only donate down ballot until Biden gets out of the race or that they won't donate to Democrats at all until he gets out. One group of donors is assembling a sort of escrow fund that will only be available to a nominee who isn't Biden. And then there's most important of all, the voters.
Biden is down two and a half points nationally in our average in head to head with Trump. And he hit an all time low in terms of approval rating, about 20 points underwater. Democratic voters were exactly split down the middle on whether Biden should get out of the race in the New York Times post debate poll. And a majority of every demographic, geographic and ideological group in that poll said that Biden is too old to be.
to be effective. Now, of course, this is still a rapidly evolving story. But Nathaniel, how are you currently thinking about how this all ends?
Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. It's very suspenseful. Like, we haven't seen anything like this in recent politics, which is both exciting and scary if you're in the business of making predictions about it. Obviously, people who have listened to the last several episodes of the podcast know I have been skeptical that Biden is going to be replaced. I still think it's the most likely scenario is that he will stay on the ticket, but
But obviously, it's also a very live possibility that he will step aside, right? People will say that they're sticking in the race like Biden did in this letter this morning, right up until the moment that they decide to drop out because they don't want to betray any weakness before that. I think ultimately it is going to come down to Biden and whatever he decides and his closest advisors and his family. I don't think that's changed from the last time that we talked.
I do think it is notable that five representatives have come out and openly said publicly our party's nominee, the sitting president, should not be the nominee. That's a notable amount of dissent. That said, more Democrats have issued statements saying that they are still in favor of Biden and they're supporting him. But of course, a lot of those people might be saying something different behind closed doors.
Yeah, Nathaniel, I wanted to ask because we were talking a little bit about before we hit record about how this compares to the Access Hollywood episode in the final months of the 2016 election and how Republicans reacted then and the
And there was in the final moments of the campaign, this moment where high profile lawmakers were disavowing the person at the top of their ticket saying, step aside, let Mike Pence be the standard bearer for the party. And we were trying to compare sort of how much dissent there was then versus how much dissent there is now. You counted up all of the dissent back in 2016 to compare to now. What did it look like then?
According to USA Today, which was compiling at the time, there were 24 Republican members of the House and 15 senators who came out either saying, I'm no longer going to support Trump or calling on him to step aside for Mike Pence, which is obviously a lot more than you have on the Democratic side now, which is interesting. Obviously, Trump stayed in the race. That said, I think like there are some key differences here. One is just like
the time where we are in the calendar, like before the convention, there is time for Democrats to course correct the Access Hollywood tape. By contrast, that was in October. Ballots had been printed and everything, which, you know, there are ways around that, but it's
it was just a very late point in the race. There's also the fact that a lot of Republicans didn't want Trump to begin with. And there was obviously a huge thing during the primary of like, we have to stop Trump. And there was a lot of resistance within the party to him. And there's the fact that it was just Donald Trump versus it's like Joe Biden. And Donald Trump, of course, is very stubborn and has refused to drop out of the race or even to not run and step aside despite all of the baggage surrounding him. And Joe Biden looks like he's very stubborn as well. But I don't
tend to think he probably is more likely to drop out of the race than Donald Trump is. So it's hard to compare, but I think it is instructive that at the end of the day, elites can put a lot of pressure on their nominee, like they did, Republicans did in 2016, more than they are currently putting on Biden. And the nominee can still survive because ultimately it is up to him. So I just think that's worth reminding people in this environment where it seems like Biden is being besieged from all sides,
that in fact, like the inertia of staying in place is still pretty high. Jeffrey, the letter that Biden sent this morning to Democratic lawmakers and the messaging out on the stump and in interviews has basically been
somewhat Trumpian, that the elites are trying to push me out, the media is trying to push me out, the pundits, you know, the rich donors, they don't want me, but I'm here because the voters want me. And sort of making this small d democratic argument, which is for me to do anything but stay in the race would be to deny the wishes of voters. Obviously, that argument was somewhat effective for Trump.
in that he could rally his voters against elites and the media and whatnot. Is the situation any different here? It's interesting. Biden basically had no opposition in the Democratic primary. Apologies to Dean Phillips. And Marianne Williamson. And Marianne Williamson. But Biden won, in the end, about 87% of the primary vote.
That figure is very similar to what Bill Clinton got in 1996. It's less than what George W. Bush or Barack Obama or Donald Trump in 2020 got when they were incumbents running for renomination. But I also took a look at the uncommitted numbers, and Biden won 84 percent of the vote in states that had some sort of uncommitted or no preference option.
And that's actually basically the same share that Obama won in 2012 in the same kinds of states. But less than what Trump and Bush did. They got like 93 percent or better in those places. So on the one hand, I think he has a case to make about the voters have spoken because they did.
However, we also had polling even back earlier this year before any of this developed, showing that there was a significant share of the party that thought, eh, might do better with a different option. And those numbers have only grown in the polls that have come out, of course, since the debate in terms of the share of people. I mean, you'll have like a New York Times Santa poll basically showing a 50-50 split among Democrats over whether Biden should remain the nominee.
And that's pretty significant. And their polling in the summer of 2022 showed over 60% of Democrats saying he ought not seek a second term. Yeah, so I think the point is, like, there was polling before all this started that said, you know, if someone significant really did get into the race to run against him,
There could be the possibility of it being interesting. But of course, as I even wrote back in like the summer of 2023, it was always really unlikely that he was going to get a serious challenger because at the end of the day, he still was popular among Democrats. And so there wasn't sort of the obvious – like there weren't obvious criticisms of Biden from the perspective of like policy.
There was the age concern. But at that point, I think the way people were viewing the age concern, the way compared to how they're viewing it now, of course, it's it's gotten it's been exacerbated. There's a couple other things, too, here. One, when elites were breaking with Donald Trump, they were in some ways breaking with the voters like the voters never really turned on Trump in the way that we're seeing voters react.
turn on or question Biden in this situation. Trump came onto the scene at a moment where elites within the Republican Party and Republican voters had a chasm between them, right? I mean, and he just walked straight through the middle of that chasm and said, on issues like trade, immigration, foreign policy, you're just not where your voters are. And so he sort of had that
And also, we know from polling that Republicans are much more skeptical of the media, for example, than Democrats are all across the board. I mean, basically every single media outlet except for maybe Breitbart, Fox News and YouGov does this polling. So this is actually based on empirical analysis.
Whereas lawmakers who come out today and say Biden should think about stepping down or should step down, there's a large chunk of voters who are right there with them agreeing. The other argument that he's making about small d democracy and sort of we can't make the argument that Trump is a threat to democracy if we are going to go against the democratic wishes of voters.
voters. That's also a complicated argument. We published in this feed, The Primaries Project, which looked at how parties nominate their candidates, both in the United States and across the world. And parties are not in the Constitution. It is totally up to the party apparatus to figure out who it wants to nominate. And we've only been doing it this way since the 70s. And basically no other democracy on earth besides maybe Argentina has
goes about choosing presidential candidates the way we do, which is just, you know, you have a primary, whoever shows up, shows up. And that's that, that the party apparatus and leadership has such little role to play. Would Biden make the argument, for example, that any president before 1974 was not democratically elected?
Would Biden make the argument, for example, that prime ministers across Europe are not democratically elected and frankly across the rest of the world for that matter? I mean, I think it's an easy case to make in a pop sense, a popular sense, but democracies are a lot more complicated than that.
I agree. I think I don't know how forcefully he wants to make that case, right? Because like if he does say no, any candidate other than me would be undemocratic and then he ends up having to step aside and then he's on record saying like Kamala Harris's selection was undemocratic or whatever. That's not great because presumably he would root hard for Harris to win in that case. At the
At the same time, I do think it would be difficult. I mean, I think this is part of why it has to be Harris if Biden does step aside, is that it would be difficult after 50 years of a process where voters get a say in their party's nominee to turn around and say, no, you actually don't get a say in this. And Harris is the only one who has said,
some kind of Democratic legitimacy. And so far as she is part of the Biden administration, which voters did, Democratic voters wanted to continue. She was theoretically before voters in the 2020 general election. Obviously, people don't normally vote for the bottom of the ticket, but theoretically, she was there. And it's just easier to make that case versus if the delegates of the convention try to, you know, install Gretchen Whitmer or something like that.
This week will play a big role in determining the questions that we're asking here, just because we've been tracking them so far. I'll mention that, Jeffrey, when we were chatting on Wednesday, the prediction markets flipped basically to Biden no longer being the favored Democratic nominee, according to people putting money on the line. I'll say this morning,
They flipped again. Joe Biden is now at, according to PolyMarket, 63% chance of being the Democratic nominee and around a 52% chance, according to PredictIt. And I think that was after the letter. He wrote the letter that came out and he called into Morning Joe on MSNBC. No matter what, this is now a bigger part of the campaign.
There's no taking back the debate. Everyone can watch it for themselves. And it's also spawned a lot of conversation about how much of a scandal this is, which is, has the White House shielded the public from information about Biden's fitness for the job? Is there a sort of scandal here that will play out over the coming four months of how much is the White House showing us? How much are they not showing us? It is now a sort of story that runs alongside this.
I don't know about that. I mean, if it turns out that he has an actual condition or the doctors have seen him and are like, oh, this isn't good, and they haven't been disclosing that, that's obviously a problem and I think you could call it a scandal. But I mean, we have a very specific definition, as you know, Galen, at 538 for scandals, which is a credible accusation of legal or moral wrongdoing. And you'd have to say that this is taking
Taking a candidate who is not very charismatic, basically, like not very good on the stump and just minimizing the amount of public appearances he has, I don't think I would call that a moral wrongdoing. Again, like I think it's different if it turns out there are actual like medical diagnoses or like doctor's notes that they aren't.
sharing with the public. But in terms of, you know, just avoiding his public appearances and trying to minimize the amount of time he spends on camera, I think that's just kind of what you do when you have a candidate who is in such rough shape.
Yeah, like Nathaniel, I don't really view it necessarily as a scandal, of course, with the similar caveats to what he said. But I think what the problem is politically for Biden and for Democrats is that this is not going to go away. Like the rest of the campaign, this is going to loom over things. If Biden remains the Democratic nominee, he could win reelection. I don't think that he is like dead on arrival yet.
Because at the end of the day, part of the reason he even has a chance of winning is because he's running against Donald Trump, who has many of his own weaknesses and problems and whatnot. However, I do wonder, and we talked a little bit about this last week, Galen, but I wonder about Democratic fears of Biden just not being able to really –
recover as much or having a lower ceiling of potential recovery because this is just there and it won't go away. And there are even polls that suggest that some voters are more worried about this than they are about Trump's felony charges, you know, and conviction. That really looms to me as like the, I mean, the key political problem. I mean, maybe it's like stating the obvious, but it's just like, you're going to spend the next four months talking about this. To put a finer point on this,
Biden has fallen by two points in our national average. That is not huge, right? He is still within the range where, and granted, the Electoral College is what decides the president, and he's probably farther behind in swing states, but it's still within the range of possibility that there could be just a normal polling error and Biden could win. It's still certainly within the range of possibility that Biden's numbers recover over the next four months. The issue is that
You don't know when another shoe is going to drop. We already had that special counsel report and we had a little news cycle about this before that went away more quickly than this did. But like, if you're Democrats, can you risk like after the next debate or like, what if on like October 31st, there's another incident that does this? And then the polls, like it's basically, you know, that there are going to be these incidents looming of potentially another two point drop, even if you've made up this ground from this two point drop. And like, are you
are you going to risk having that happen like the week of the election and basically losing you the election just because of a badly timed incident? Like that's a huge, huge risk. Yeah, Nathaniel, that's an important point. And to exactly that point, Biden plans on doing a press conference this week, I believe on Thursday in conjunction with the NATO conference that he's hosting in Washington. So exactly as you said, another opportunity for us to all tune in and see
see what happens. I'll also say, as I mentioned at the top, that we are expecting news about Trump's VP pick anytime over the next seven days. And we will, of course, have an emergency reaction podcast when we find out who it ultimately is. Of course, the top three contenders reportedly are J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Doug Burgum, a very different set of finalists than
I think where we began the process earlier this year, which was more maybe, you know, Tim Scott or Sarah Huckabee Sanders, or of course, even Christina Ohm. We are going to leave things there for now. Thank you, Nathaniel and Jeffrey. Thanks, Galen. Thank you, Galen.
My name is Galen Druke. 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 us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you soon.
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