Can Dems Sweep the 2024 Elections?
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Welcome to another special episode of Pod Save America. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. This is the second of four bonus pods I'll be hosting on Sundays in the lead up to the election.

If you like these episodes, I highly recommend you sign up to get my subscriber show, Polar Coaster, by subscribing to Friends of the Pod at crooked.com slash friends or through the Apple podcast feed. It's where we really dig deep into polling, and it's a great way to support Crooked Media. And we have a 25% off discount for annual subscriptions right now. In today's episode, I'll be talking to Amy Walter, one of the smartest people I know in politics, the publisher and editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report, and host of her own podcast, The Odd Years.

about the state of the House and Senate races and Democrats' chances of winning a trifecta in this election. Amy Walter, welcome to Pod Save America. How are you? Thank you. I'm pretty good. I'm still here. So really, that's the goal. That is the goal, that I am upright and, you know, just trying to pace myself. While we have you on, I want to talk about the presidential race, but also the Senate and the House, something you're in all three of which you're an expert in. Let's start with the presidential. Okay.

Three weeks ago or so, Democrats were feeling ecstatic. They were feeling confident. Over the last week or so, the Democrats have gotten anxious. This is the phase we get in every year. Have you seen anything in what you've seen in the race, in the polling, in the people you're talking to that would justify the vibe shift among Democrats? Yeah, Dan, it's a really good question. And I dug into this myself because...

I always wonder how much of this is real and how much of this is just sort of a mood that's not backed up by actual data. And so if you look at the national average, like things haven't moved that much. They're moving around the edges.

At the state level, I think the reason for the frustration, depression, whatever you want to call it, anxiety among Democrats is that you could see – and if you go to the FiveThirtyEight site, which does a great job with this, right, because they have the trend line. And you, as well as many of the folks in your business, in our business, appreciate a good trend line, right? Yeah.

And what you can see, though it is a very small trend line, but that the peak for Harris was basically, not surprisingly, close to the end of September, right? That was after she had the strong debate performance. You had the DNC that went really well. The waltz rollout went well, right? Like that was, I would say, peak Harris.

for Harris. And since then, it's kind of gone down. And so instead of being ahead in a state like Michigan by an average of two points, she's now ahead by nine-tenths of a point, right, or one point. So we're really talking about movement of a point or a half a point in most of those battleground states. But as you know,

half a point or a point is the difference between winning and losing in these states. So it seems there is some reason to, again, if you're just looking at the poll averages to say, well, boy, was that a peak? Did she peak too early? That's the thing Democrats also love to talk about. Oh, we peaked too early. We need to peak at the election. But it's also a sign that, you know, coalescing the base has gotten her

to a certain place, but it's not getting her as far as she needs to to win this thing outright. The other thing I noticed, and we noticed this in our own data as well as just looking at all those national, the network polls that came out last weekend, that her slipping is with independent voters. And so, you know, that's something to keep

aware of. But again, we're talking about a movement of half a point to a point. So freak out about that as you will. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Choose your level of panic based on the information. Yes. It's so hard because...

We've never seen a race this close in all the states. That's right. It's just usually the margins are a little bit larger, and usually they're larger in some states and maybe narrow in just the tipping point state, for instance. But here, it's all seven and nationally are within the margin of error. So it's so hard to separate.

Real movement from statistical noise. From noise. And then, right, and from what is – to me, it kind of comes back to, all right, well, how likely do you think these people who are answering the polls or who we're waiting the polls to are going to show up, right? And that's where we –

really get into the difficult prediction part because, you know, we all talk about it comes down, it all comes down to turnout. But nobody really knows what that's going to look like. Yeah. And you, you know, as part of your quick political report, Swing State Polling Project, you had an analysis that showed that Kamala Harris is doing much better with highly engaged voters and that Trump is depending on

low to mid-propensity. Can you talk a little bit about what you guys found there? Yeah, yeah. Thanks for bringing that up. Right. We did this project. We've had three different polls. We're doing them with BSG, the Benenson Strategy Group, a Democratic polling firm, and GS Strategy Group, which is a Republican firm. And these guys have been fantastic partners, in part because they both work in

that are purple or sometimes in states that aren't friendly to their side. So they appreciate a real swing state. But what we did is we broke up the overall electorate in those seven states into basically three buckets. One being people who show up in every, who've shown up in the last four elections.

And what we know about people who show up in election after election is they're going to show up in this election, right? If you voted in four out of the last four elections, there's a 90-plus percent chance you're showing up in this election as long as you're physically able to do so. The next—and by the way, that group of voters, that's somewhere around 60 percent of the electorate, right? So they're the biggest share but, you know, just over a majority, right?

Then another 30-ish percent fall into the category. They voted in anywhere from one to three of the last four elections. And then the final bucket, which is the smallest bucket, are people who said they've registered since 2022. So they weren't able to vote in any of those four elections. Now,

The one consistent for May through this last poll we did in September is those most engaged voters were voting for the Democrat, whether that's Biden or Harris, by four points. And that goes to kind of the makeup of that electorate, which we know is it's an older group. It is whiter than average, right? It's less diverse than the overall electorate.

And it's probably going to be more college educated than the overall electorate. And these are the voters that are propelling and have propelled Democrats.

to success in 2018, in 2020, but certainly most, I think, most notably in 2022. And if those were the only voters that turned out in this election, that would be pretty good news for Kamala Harris to be ahead by four points in the battleground states, right? This isn't nationally, this is a battleground state.

But then you put in those low propensity voters and Trump has about a seven point lead with those voters. His lead among them has varied between five and ten points. And those voters, again, not surprisingly, younger. They are going to be identify more as independent, more diverse voters.

in terms of the electorate. And what's funny, Dan, is when you and I came up in politics, we would look at that group of voters, we'd say younger, more diverse. Those are Democrats. You just need to get them out to vote. Right now, they're leaning more to Trump. Now, I don't know. I think a big piece of his success has been

from the, really from the very beginning, from 2016, is turning out people who are not traditional voters, right? People who are either tuned out of politics or who are really cynical about politics. And so if we think about, all right, what is, what's motivating those voters and how does Harris sort of chop into that group of voters?

you know, some of them are going to be motivated by something that she does or says that also feels like it's different, like she is going after the status quo as well, that she's skeptical of, you know, a lot of the institutions out there. And, you know,

So her message, when I see her message on things like, you know, we're taking on price gouging, we're taking on big pharma, right, it is aimed at...

A lot of the voters out there who are in that camp of, yeah, I'm the little guy. I'm getting picked on by the big guy. Where Trump wins them over, of course, is by saying, I am the great disruptor. I am not beholden to anyone or anything. I am unlike any other politician, and that makes me able to do things that no other politician's been able to do.

It's very interesting you say, like the reversal in the parties. I was interviewing, which is an awkward experience for me, but I was interviewing David Plouffe last week, and he was making this case about it. And it is like an out-of-body experience because that was the Obama coalition. That was the argument against Obama's electability, both in the primaries and the general, was relying on all these young people. Young people never vote. But what is interesting, though—

is like we knew that challenge and we built a campaign to account for that, a massive volunteer-driven food organization we had organized everywhere. And the Trump folks are taking a very different approach. That's right. They don't have a traditional food organization. They've outsourced it to Elon Musk and others. I'm sure you're hearing plenty of concerns, as everyone does from Republicans, about the status of that. What have you heard? That's right.

You know, I do hear that. It's not as loud as, say, it was in 2020 when there was a lot of hand-wringing about the fact that Trump was actively discouraging people from doing mail-in voting. You know, I would talk to folks in Pennsylvania who were like,

You know, we the mail in vote piece, we're trying to put a mail in vote program in place, but we are getting pushback from the very people who are supposed to be helping us institute it because Trump told them that it was it was rigged. Right. So they are now doing.

more of a, and outside groups are doing more of a mail-in process with their voters. Now, does that mean they're picking up those low propensity voters with the mail-in program? I don't know. That's a, that is a very, that is very, very good question. And, you know, it also comes back to, look, how much do you believe that the

The reason that, say, Trump did better in 2020 than many expected was because they did doors and traditional field and Democrats did not. I don't know. I mean, I'm not here to say that field doesn't matter or that all those people who are working really hard on both sides, on the ground, going to doors –

that it doesn't make a difference. What I wonder, though, is whether what Trump has shown time and time again is his ability to infiltrate into areas of the electorate that nobody else can, no traditional politician can, is what allows him to get turnout among voters even without the quote-unquote traditional voting.

It's really interesting because in 16 and 20, well, 16 in particular, his turnout, sort of his turnout boost was primarily among...

white, non-college educated, primarily rural voters who are true, who are profiled. They come from Republican parts of the country. They, they profiles Republican. They had just not, there were people who found Mitt Romney to be not someone who could speak to them. And Trump could, we can probably spend six years trying to understand why that is, but that is the case here. He's trying to do something a little bit different. He's trying to get people who, uh,

are come from democratic parts of the country in some cases who are have agreed with democrats on some issues to do it so it's just it's interesting we're obviously not going to know it's really i know it and this is the really fascinating question right which is i mean if you i was just looking through um today the support that trump is getting from black voters right and and

You know, he's getting somewhere like 20 percent of black men. Now, that's nationally. I don't know. You know, you'd have to get into some of the crosstabs of these other polls to see how he's doing in states like Georgia, et cetera. But essentially what the polls seem to be telling us and the reason that Trump is doing better in Georgia, let's say, than in Pennsylvania or in Wisconsin, is that it

exact thing, Dan, is that he's doing that much better with Black voters than I would assume that it's going to be with Black men. The thing that I keep coming back to, and I know your conversation with David Plouffe kind of centered on this too, is this idea of looking at Trump's

vote share rather than focusing on the margin. So I was just looking at, for example, the Pew poll out from early October. And if you look at the support that Donald Trump is getting from, say, men under 50, OK, in 2020, Biden won those voters by 10 men under 50. And he's

And right now, Trump is only losing them by one. So that's, you know, a nine-point swing. But if you look just at the share of the vote that Trump is getting from those voters, it's not any different. I can't remember the exact number. Let's call it...

Let's call it 39%, okay? And now he's getting 40% of those voters. So what you have is a whole chunk of younger voters who are sitting out there who are not committed to Trump, but they're not giving their votes to Harris yet either. And that goes to this point about who would you rather be in this scenario? Would you rather be the Harris campaign, who's basically then it seems like their challenge is –

Getting those voters to come out for them rather than sitting at home instead of worrying about whether those voters are going to actually go to Donald Trump. In other words, he is looking stronger with those voters in part because Harris's numbers look that much weaker than where Biden was at the end of 2020. And so that's the thing that I keep thinking.

sort of grappling with, to your point about like, well, what does this really, really look like? And how many of these people actually do come out and go to the polls? So I think there is a real underperformance for Harris at this moment. But what we don't know is if that's going to result in an over performance at the end of the day by Trump.

Yeah, this is such a confusing election in so many ways. But one of the ways is that I think in order to adjust for the

anti-Trump polling error last time is everyone is trying to, most, I would say most people are trying to model their, the, their vision of the 2024 electorate based on the 2020 electorate. Right. Exactly. We're getting into the very esoteric debate about whether you wait your poll based on the how people voted, voted in 2020. Exactly.

And that could be right, that could be wrong, but that was in itself a black swan election because of the pandemic and the changes in voting behavior. Turnout was so high. And so it's just the margins and the vote share in Hallis actually looks as there is this feeling, and I've never seen an election where so few people are confident in saying anything about what could possibly happen because we're all on a very rickety ledge with how we're looking at it. It's possible that

how we're thinking about it and how we're, and it's been so long, like even 16 was a very bizarre election to low turnout, relative huge third party participation that tilted these States. Then you have 2020 and now here we are with a new brand new candidate who started four months ago that they, you know, there's never been a less known candidate. Exactly. Yeah. And that we've never had, we've had, we have an election where again,

You know, growing up in politics, you always say, well, all right, what's a presidential election about? Do you want to stay the course or do you want to go in a different direction? And what's fascinating about this election is we have the guy who is the challenger. So the different direction is the semi incumbent. Right. People. This is not brand new to anybody about what direction he wants to go in and what it would be like.

to have a term with him in office. And then you have Harris, who's also new. As you said, people don't, there's still a lot to fill in about her. And yet she's the incumbent and having to defend the status quo. So you can't really put either one of them cleanly into that. I'm the change candidate. They are both trying to grab onto that. And then they both have their past, their past votes, their past...

behaviors that are tethering them to this idea that they're really not change. So I think that's what's also hard about it because you're right. If you were in a cave, Dan, for the last 10 years, or maybe let's not call it a cave. Let's say you were just in a luxurious, wonderful place for 10 years. You knew nothing about our politics. The last campaign you did

was 2008, and you came out and you said, and I told you, there's an incumbent president, not running again, but...

with an approval rating in the 40s, and we're coming off a really high inflationary period where people are still pretty frustrated about the state of the economy. Oh, and 70% of people think the country's headed in the wrong direction. Do you think that incumbent party would win? You'd be like, no, probably not. I mean, I'd rather be the out party. Right. If that was a Poli Sci 101 test and you wrote yes, the incumbent party would win, you would fail. And I think that's just an...

No one knows what's going to happen, but there is this – you can hear it in some of the critiques that's happening. Like this is a race that Kamala Harris should be running away with. Now put aside that bespeaks a real misunderstanding of how polarization works and how the electoral college works. But even then, on paper, this is Trump's election to lose. That's right. Just based on – there we go. Everything right there. And she's being asked to do something –

unprecedented to go from a standing start to running against not just some random schmo nominated by the Republican Iowa caucus, but by the former incumbent president of the United States running again. And so it just, I think our every, a lot of sort of the, um,

The framework of analysis that's come to this election, I think, is off because Trump is such a unique figure. But when you do the fundamentals, and it's interesting because the fundamentals of the political environment massively favor Trump for all the reasons you said. You can put aside the fact that unemployment is at a historic low because of inflation, because of Biden's approval rating, because of the wrong direction number. But the fundamentals of her candidacy

favor her, right? She's more popular. And in general, in a normal world, you would, she's significantly more popular. You would say undecideds break for the better light candidate. You would say she has, who has more money?

Who has a better campaign and a better organization. So it is like these two big, you know, these two forces going against each other, right? Between the political environment for Trump and the candidacy and the candidate skills for her. Yeah. And that makes, right, that makes it all the harder to figure out where these last batch of people who are not yet committed to voting slash committed to a candidate are.

are going to, you know, what is it that's going to push those voters over the edge? And, you know, again, in the old days, you'd say, well, there's going to be, you know, what is it? What are we, what's the issue environment going into the last three weeks of this election? Again, and who is that going to favor? So,

I mean, there's a lot that's happened, Dan. We've had two assassination attempts on one candidate. We have a growing war in the Middle East. We've got, you know, let's see, major disasters, natural disasters in North Carolina and Florida. None of those things alone are making much of a dent in terms of

the race in terms of just the overall polling or the sense that, oh, this is a political environment that is going to be beneficial to one candidate or the other. There's so much conversation about the October surprise. What's the October surprise? Maybe we already had it when we had two hurricanes on the first week of October. But what's different now is not only –

Do we have this small group of voters who are going to sign the selection? But the media environment is so different now. Like, I think all the time about 2004 and the last weekend when that audio tape of bin Laden came out and leading every newspaper, every news story was about bin Laden pledging to attack America again. And I don't know whether John Kerry would have won if that had not come out, but that definitely –

puts in people's head an issue environment that's in favor of Bush. This is a security election. Exactly. Let's take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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The narrative is that the Democratic chance of holding the Senate has gone way down. This was spurred in large part by your publication, the Cook Political Report, moving Jon Tester from a toss-up race to a lean Republican race.

How do you see the overall Senate map right now? And I assume you agree with that assessment about our chances. Yeah, it is. You know, look, this was always going to be a challenging map for Democrats. We've known that since the very beginning of the cycle. So holding on to three red states in a presidential year is tough. Tester's challenge in Montana is even a little bit harder than, say, Georgia.

Sherrod Brown's challenge in Ohio because Trump is going to win the state of Montana by probably twice as much as he will win Ohio. So for Tester to win, he's going to need to get, you know, one in five Trump voters or something like that. I think there was a time, again, going back, I feel like this old person now, back in my day, but, you know, where Montana was a more parochial place,

and where you could be a Max Baucus, a John Tester, where you are a Montana Democrat. You are distinguished by people in that state from national Democrats, in part because of your voting record, but also how you look and act, right? The farmer and the buzz cut and the whole deal, which in an era of...

more nationalized politics and in a state that is growing really, really quickly. I think the number now is only half the people who are in Montana right now were actually born there. And so that makes it really,

really hard for Tester to outrun the national environment like he was able to do in previous years. I think the remarkable thing to watch, though, is how well Sherrod Brown has been holding on in a state that Trump's probably going to carry by 10 points. And I think some of that is Brown's own brand. But

The fact that he has been able to outspend and, in fact, went on the air early and his Republican opponent was dark for a good chunk of the summer, allowing Brown to really control the narrative around this race. Now, at the end of the day, Moreno may be able to just count on a strong Trump performance to pull him up over the line. So it's not as dangerous to...

to be trailing an incumbent like Moreno is right now or be tied with an incumbent as it would be in a purple state or a bluer state. So you put those three states in really dangerous territory, that means that Democrats are gonna have to find two states. Or if we just say Montana's the only one that flips,

They've got to pick up one state and Harris win the presidency in order to hold the Senate.

And if we look at the map, we see Texas coming in there. Nebraska has been quite the surprise, even though he's not technically a Democrat. He's an independent who hasn't said who he's going to caucus with. But it would definitely make the politics of the Senate even more interesting should you have another independent in there. But look, I think Colin Allred has run a very, very strong race in Texas. Yeah.

Driven in part by the fact that it is, as we've seen since 2018, if you're a Democrat running against Ted Cruz, you can raise a lot of money. Ted Cruz raises you a lot of money.

just out of sheer spite, people like to donate to people running against Cruz. People they generally don't like. Generally don't like, right, exactly. So it's, you know, I'm not taking anything away from him, but if you're running against Ted Cruz, there's a lot of money sitting out there from people who just don't like Ted Cruz. But that's still a tough, that's a tough haul to get from

you know, 46, 47% as a Democrat to 50 in the state of Texas. Every 1% is just brutal. And it's going to depend a lot on what happens with a Latino vote, right? Are we...

snapping back some to where we were before 2020? Are we staying at 2020? And is there erosion? Back in my day, it was Texas was on its inexorable path to be a blue state because of the margins Obama and then Hillary were getting with Latino voters.

Then that changed after 2020, and now we are in a much different place. Do you have a feel for Nebraska? I've never seen a race where there's been such conflicting polling. There are some polls that show it incredibly close. I've seen polls that – not the highest of quality polls, I don't think, that have shown the Democrat – that have shown Dan Osborne ahead.

I've seen polls that have shown huge leads for Fisher. I think you guys have Fisher as a lean Republican or – is that right? Yeah. I think we have it in likely right now. Likely, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this feels – in some ways it feels somewhat familiar. We've seen this in other Plains states. We saw it in Kansas, right, with Pat Roberts where an independent candidate who was really a Democrat but ran as an independent candidate.

It got very close until it wasn't close at all. And so there's a formula here for a Republican to, you know, you just have to make the case that this person who calls themselves an independent is actually aligned with the Democrat, make it a national partisan race, right?

and you pull out a win. I think Osborne has been successful for a couple of reasons. The first is he just doesn't look or act like your typical politician. The fact that he's not aligned with the party, I think, helps. He's a former labor leader.

and has a good story to tell. And Fisher, I think, is not as particularly well-known and not well-defined in that state. So he kind of snuck up on her. It's hard to sneak up on a senator, right? About six years to prepare for this thing. It's hard to sneak up on anybody in politics these days, but he did just that. And so...

You know, look, at the end of the day, it is still Nebraska. But the fact that this race is where it is, it's also notable that his last name is Osborne. Now, you may remember there was a very famous football coach named Tom Osborne, the football coach for the University of Nebraska. He had an E at the end of his name. This Osborne does not, who was also a member of Congress. So the name Osborne in Nebraska is actually –

It's a good name. It's a good brand to have. So I don't know how much of it he's – how much he's benefiting there. But it is clear that he's picking up some level of support from people who are also voting for Donald Trump, right? The kinds of people who I think would say, yeah, I like Donald Trump because he shakes it up and he's not one of the insiders. This guy seems –

like a not insidery kind of guy to me too. And she's part of the system and part of the establishment, so to speak. So yeah, every year you've got one of these races. There's usually one in the house too where an incumbent that nobody was paying attention to all of a sudden looks like

Like they are in a lot of trouble. And, you know, the money is starting to flow to her. But he has been able to raise an incredible amount of money. And this is where the nationalization of politics actually helps candidates because a candidate in Nebraska is now able to raise money from people around the country in a way you couldn't

Back in the pre-internet, pre-gays. There's no grassroots money for a Nebraska Senate candidate. You're just counting on PACs to decide whether your side was going to be the majority or not. Exactly. So let's talk about the House. In all the various models I've seen, Democrats have slight favorites to take the House. I find the House fascinating because

We spent some time talking about the red states there, but the Senate map mostly overlays over the presidential map. And so the same trends are affecting Kamala Harris in Wisconsin, are affecting Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin. Same thing for Bob Casey in Pennsylvania. So there's a lot of that. The House is very different. There are obviously some battleground House districts in Pennsylvania and states like that, but it's really going to be decided in New York, in California, two states which kind of underperformed in 2022. What do you guys think of the House? That's right.

Well, I'm really glad you brought up New York and California because the one thing we're noticing in both of those states, which you're right, if you look at – if I told you that, look, Democrats' chances run through California and New York in a presidential year, normally you'd say, well, that's great for Democrats because those are two great states for us. Right.

certainly will have higher turnout than we did in 2022, which was a weird year. And you have an unpopular governor in New York and a not very inspired top of the ticket race in California. And so we had really low turnout.

At the same time, we're seeing, at least right now, that there's still some sign that that Republican – I don't know if I would call it momentum, but Republican success in New York and California wasn't just about low turnout in 2022. Yeah.

This is especially true if you're looking at the districts that Democrats need to pick off in California where you have a significant Latino population. It goes back to that question of how well will Trump and Republicans do with Latino voters in a presidential election cycle compared to, say, an off year? Yeah.

Again, in the not so distant past, you would say, oh, if it's an overwhelmingly Latino district, it will perform better for Democrats in a presidential year than in a midterm year. But you can't take that to the bank now, not certainly with where we've seen some of these trends with Latino voters going. And in New York, you know –

The redrawing of the map that Democrats did didn't really do much to harm Republicans.

It shored up a couple of their Democrats, which, you know, playing defense is important too. But there still are signs that Long Island and some of the places in upstate slash Hudson Valley are just not, they're not going to perform as well for Harris as they did for Biden. At least they're not right now. Again, it doesn't mean Harris loses these places. It's just that instead of winning them

By 10 or 12, it's, you know, 6 or 4. And that means that these challengers, you know, they have a bit of a tailwind, but not as strong of a tailwind as you would expect. To me, it's also like...

You know, you've got some quirky races in there, too. We've got Democrats holding on in red places, and they look pretty strong now. Marcy Kaptur in Toledo, who was supposed to be—

Coast years ago. Absolutely. They drew her a terrible district and she's still holding on. And you've got in the Lehigh Valley, Matt Cartwright, in another district that has shifted dramatically to the right.

He's still holding on. Jared Golden, I haven't seen any data up there recently, but, you know, up in Maine. So the incumbent Democrats in those red districts are holding on too. And so to me, it's really where Democrats are defending some of these open seats, like in Michigan. Yeah, what's the slotkin seat? Those are those two slot, the slotkin seat and the...

The Kildee seat up there, those are going to be critically important. Abigail Spanberger's district in Virginia. Normally, these races, the closest races all break one way. So you see our toss-up

Usually, I think we have 24 in there, and usually 70% of the races would go one direction or the other. So that still may happen in this case. But you're right, they're all in different areas. So you could see something like, yeah, the New York races go one way, the California races go one way, but North Carolina and Ohio and Michigan go a different way. Yeah. So it makes for...

a really, really close, close call on who has an advantage here. And if these things play out the way they have in recent years where the top of the ticket is as important as the – it's not more important, but it is incredibly important to what happens below the

you know, on the races below it, you know, outrunning your presidential nominee becomes really challenging. And it's interesting because in the Senate, in a lot of the races, you're seeing Democratic candidates outrun Harris. Now, I think that's narrowed some. It has definitely narrowed some. In Wisconsin, Pennsylvania in particular. And I think there's kind of unique situations in Arizona. Arizona and Nevada. In particular. Yeah.

And a little bit in Michigan, I think, uh, Mike Rogers is not, he has some challenges, um, in reinventing himself as a Trump Republican. Yep. CNN contributors to Trump Republican is a tough pivot over the course of a couple of years, uh, with a way station and living in Florida, I think to, uh, get there, but you're seeing them come together, uh,

And so I guess you would say the most likely scenario is the winner of the presidential wins the House as well. That's probably what you would expect. That's what we have seen forever and ever and ever. But wouldn't this be the right year for that to be upended? And so we have a whole bunch of this has never happened before scenarios that could happen, which is a double flip, right? The Senate and the House going different ways, right?

You could see that the presidential goes one way and the House goes the other, which, again, haven't seen. I think the last time the House flipped control in a presidential year was in the 1950s. So Eisenhower was president the last time that happened. I think the one thing we can feel somewhat confident in is that we're not going to get an answer today.

on election night or the day after the election or maybe two days after the election. Yeah, it could be weeks, frankly, as it was in 2018. Yeah. And then if it's really close, then we're going to have recounts and on top of recounts. So that should be quite something.

Well, I think it's a great place to leave it there. Amy, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Always smarter after I read you or hear you talk. Oh, you're so nice. Thank you. Appreciate it. Good luck for these last two and a half weeks here. Thanks. You too. Let's take a short break, but before we do, I have an ask. If you're listening to this podcast, you're already supporting the work we do here at Crooked Media, so thank you for that. As you may have heard, we're currently offering 25% off annual subscriptions to Friends of the Pod.

Here's why you should sign up. Crooked's mission is to create a space for honest conversations about news, politics, and the world around us. And no matter who wins in 2024, we'll remain committed to that mission. To put it simply, building the shows and initiatives we envision for 2025 requires people, time, and resources. Signing up for an annual membership to our subscription service is the best way to support us as we make shows and launch new projects.

The 25% discount on new annual subscriptions is an amazing deal. But more importantly, your subscription powers the work we do on our shows and through Vote Save America. So please help us build a strong, progressive, independent media. Head to crooked.com slash friends or to the Apple podcast feed to learn more.

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Now I'm joined by Polar Coasters producer Caroline Reston to answer your questions from our subscriber discord. Caroline, take it away. Dan, I'm happy to be here on Pod Save. I was told by Elijah to downplay my banter by 50%. So if you guys want full. I mean, you know what that means? I want you to double your banter. Do not. Elijah's just trying to stem everyone's growth here because he wants, he likes to be the positive America producer celebrity. He does. And I get it. Fame is a toxic drug. So I get it.

OK, so we have a few questions here from the discord. The first one we got asked many, many times. So I'm eagerly awaiting your answer. CNN was reporting on record early voting in Georgia. And Dan, you previously have talked about that. The more people that vote, the better it probably is for Trump. What are these early voting numbers saying? Do not read anything into this.

Early vote is we spend a lot of time trying to parse early vote numbers, and it tells us very little. Because this could mean really high turnout. Or it could mean that a lot of people who had previously voted –

on election day have decided that for the purposes of convenience to vote early vote. So you're not adding any new voters. It may not necessarily be any higher. You're just shifting from election day voters to early voters. Also how enthusiastic people are. They will often just vote on the first day as early vote and vote in mail becomes more normalized in this country. You're going to have more people doing that. It could tell us something great. It could tell us something terrible. We just don't know.

So over the course of time, the campaigns will be able to analyze, take the number who voted, run it through their database and determine whether these are just typical voters who were going to vote anyway. And now they're voting early. Are they new voters, people who we did not think were going to vote? Are they low propensity voters that we were hoping to get to the polls? But based on what we know right now, you can't really read into it one thing, good or bad. Great answer to that question. We don't know. But don't freak out. Here's another question.

I saw that Republicans have completely outpaced Democrats in voter registration in swing states. How much should we be worried about this? How much is it due to people changing their registration to match their 2020 preferences versus a legitimate operation to recruit more Republicans? It is something to worry about. Now, I would state that for a long time, people...

don't change their voter registration. And they, so you, they may have registered as a Democrat when Bill Clinton was president and they've been voting Republican ever since, but they've remained a Democrat because they don't vote in primaries. And so there's no point in changing their registration. You will often see, um,

In an election where there's no primary on one side and a presidential primary on the other, the side having the presidential primary will usually gain registrants because people will register to participate in the primary through the registered independents who have always voted Republican, maybe even a few Democrats who registered Republicans to vote

in that primary. And so look, you want to have more registered voters. Democrats for a long time had a huge edge. That edge was larger than our typical edge in statewide races. So there were some people who were registered as Democrats but voting as Republicans. But it's not as bad as it sounds. But in general, you want to be gaining more registrants, not losing your advantage.

Okay, people are asking very extensive questions on this Discord, which is great, but reading these are quite a mouthful. That's why you should subscribe to Friends of the Pod and join the Discord, because there's some really smart people asking smart questions. They really are. Okay, should the Democrats prioritize energizing their base rather than focusing heavily on swing voters? This is how the press portrays swing voters. The avatar of the swing voter in traditional political media narratives is...

usually a white man or woman in their 40s to 50s in Wisconsin. They go to a diner, they print out the white papers of the Republicans and the white papers of the Democrats, and they go through them to see whose policies would benefit them more. And that's not what, that's not, there are some voters like that. They're definitely, I don't know about the printing out of things anymore, but there are people choosing between Trump and Harris. Like that does exist. But the largest swath of quote unquote swing voters or persuasion targets are people choosing between your candidate and the couch.

People who don't like Donald Trump, they kind of like Kamala Harris. They don't know if politics works for them. And so that is who both campaigns are actually focusing on. Trump is not focusing on his base. He's actually there to the extent they have any sort of GOTV operation. It is to try to get low engagement voters, people who

profile as Republican, but do not typically vote. And those could be young men are a huge part, including black and Latino men are a huge part of Trump's target there. Democrats have a much wider swath of voters that we're going to do that with also includes young voters, men and women, people who have never voted before, who were trying to get registered.

And so the idea that swing voters in the base are these two entirely different things, I think, is a misnomer born of some pretty lazy political writing over the years. Dan, if my memory serves me well, you once said that donating to campaigns directly is more impactful than donating to PACs.

Explain further. Yes, your memory does serve you well. And let me offer some context for that. But the reason why donating to campaigns is more cost efficient and effective than donating to PACs is when it comes to television ads, not digital ads, but television ads.

The stations are required to offer the lowest available rate to the campaigns themselves, and they can gouge the living shit out of super PACs or any PAC, frankly. And so right now, based on what I've heard, a super PACs are spending five to six times the amount of money per commercial as the Harrison Trump campaigns or congressional and Senate campaigns are paying. And so when it comes to actual, they sort of campaign like super PACs,

and others that are going to run ads on television, donating to the campaign is much more efficient. Now, there are a lot of great organizations, many of them we support at Vote Save America, who are PACs that do organizing.

Right. They're going they're doing deep canvassing, the registering voters are getting voters to the poll. And those groups pay the same amount of money as per, you know, whatever it is they're buying as the campaign does. But for the purpose of who's spending money on television, give your money to the campaign because that's how you're going to get much more bang for your buck that way.

Okay, Dan, another question. If you could design your ideal three-week-out polling that doesn't already exist or isn't publicly shared, and your only budget and scale constraints are that you cannot collect info from any true swing state, what states would you be polling, and what measures and what differentials would you be watching with the greatest degree of interest? Oh!

I mean, what a question. I'm going to simplify that question. Please do. Some. I think I would look at, there are two states that are not getting a lot of polling that I would like to see polled because I think they tell us something about what could be happening nationally with certain groups. And so one of them is New Mexico. This is a state that was in play when Biden was the 9-1-1.

nominee, so much so that Trump was leading in some internal campaign polls in New Mexico. From the limited polling I've seen, it has reverted back to its relatively safe status from 2020 and before. But I'd like to know that for sure. I'd like to see what's happening there. So much of the election depends on whether Trump can get to 40% of the Latino vote.

Looking at New Mexico would be a very interesting place to do that. And I think looking at the Latino vote in a state that's not seeing a ton of campaign ads would be helpful to give us some sort of hint in what's happening in other parts of the country, like California and New York, where you have huge swaths of Latino vote. They're going to decide the house that I want. I'd like to see New Jersey. New Jersey is another state that moved towards

They moved towards Trump when Biden was the nominee. It's theoretically a snapback. There's almost no polling there. We have an important Senate race there where Andy Kim is running to take Bob Menendez's seat as Bob Menendez heads off to prison or wherever he's going. And

In 2021, a Republican almost won the governorship there. A Republican former truck driver who had no money and ran no real campaign almost beat Governor Phil Murphy. And New York has moved a little to the right. I'd like to see if that was happening in New Jersey as well. Interesting time for your last name to be Menendez. I had to get that into one episode of Pod Save America. Okay, Dan, last question, arguably the most important one.

If you had to awkwardly sway on stage for 39 minutes, what song would you choose to dance to? I don't think I can answer this question. Um, all of my dance, all of my dancing is awkwardly swaying. Um, there's no other, there's no other, but what's your ideal song? Um,

My ideal song to sway to? Yeah, and in front of a really big, awkward crowd. Is it going to be the same song for 30 minutes or is it going to be a genre of music? No, it has to be. We're going to put it on repeat. One song on repeat for 39 minutes. Huh. I would say Bohemian Rhapsody because it's a long song. So you're only really getting it in like three times. I would say I prepared for the differential question and the what would my ideal...

I did not prepare for, and I would say in my defense, the actual question as submitted, although you edited it, was, Dan, if you had to awkwardly sway on stage to an aria, and I'm not sure I could name an aria, Ave Maria, I guess, because that's the one Trump did, but my aria knowledge is limited. Okay, I didn't know what that meant.

So I just slide it right over it. You can't just take the questioner's questions and then change them to fit what you're interested in. I absolutely can. Okay. All too well, 10 minute version would be your Sway song. Thanks so much for taking Discord questions. Thank you, Discord.

That'll wrap up today's episode. Thank you to Amy Walter and to our subscribers for the great questions. I'll be back in your feeds next Sunday with another one of these episodes. And if you're already a friend of the pod subscriber, I'll be on your feet again soon for a new episode of Polar Coaster. Thanks, everyone.

Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our producers are Andy Gardner Bernstein and Olivia Martinez. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Thanks to Hallie Kiefer, Madeline Herringer, Ari Schwartz, Andy Taft, and Justine Howe for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Mia Kellman, Ben Hefko, and David Tolles.

Subscribe to Pod Save America on YouTube to catch full episodes, exclusive content, and other community events. Find us at youtube.com slash at Pod Save America.

Um...

Did you know police captured five runaway zebras in Washington yesterday? Well played. Get all your favorite news programs for the best price. Sling lets you do that. Visit sling.com to see your offer. Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co-founder of Angie. When you use Angie for your home projects, you know all your jobs will be done well. From roof repair to emergency plumbing and more, done well. So the next time you have a home project, leave it to the pros. Get started at Angie.com.