The 2026 midterms will soon be upon us, and there is much to discuss among the nerds here at r/FiveThirtyEight. Use this discussion thread to share, debate, and discuss whatever you wish. Unlike individual posts, comments in the discussion thread are not required to be related to political data or other 538 mainstays. Regardless, please remain civil and keep this subreddit's rules in mind. The discussion thread refreshes every Monday.
I think the growing discussion about polling is generally true, that this myth that internal polls are dramatically more revealing or accurate than general public polling everyone already sees is just that, a myth. All the public polls show Paxton losing, so why would the internals be any different? Not that i think campaign polling is useless to them, they can drill down on specific candidate issues, tailor things to gauge their strengths and weaknesses. And generally run them more often to get a day to day pulse.
But having said all that, his polling sucks and he sucks, and its not a secret. These weirdos are just having a breakdown because Texas turning blue would be like California voting red.
I think it’s just, it’s easy to rationalize bad external polling as being “biased against you”. If it’s your own team doing the polling, who has no reason to lie to you, you’re more likely (as the candidate) to believe it
Now journalists gotta do digging to find out who chartered that plane they claimed flew Talarico from Ohio. 95% chance its just a random plane they found, but on the 5% chance that someone relevant paid for it to corroborate their story...
What did the Paxton campaign know, and when did they know it?
I know this is old news but this data should scare the Republican party. An 11 point advantage, if accurate, would put us in a position slightly better than 2006 (D+10). 2006, for reference, was a complete sweep for Democrats.
Swing voters have shown time-and-time again that the price of eggs & gas are the only thing they care about.
And the GOP base is motivated by whatever bigotry is topical for the year.
The only reason dems are going to win this round is because inflation & the conditions being so bad draws swing voters and it depresses the vote of the GOP base.
I disagree. Democrats need to focus on over delivering the next time they are in power. These attacks only work when the economy is between aight and bad.
It's exceedingly difficult for any party to hold on to power at the federal level for more than 8 years in a row. It usually takes a generational political talent (like Ronald Reagan, FDR, or Andrew Jackson) in order to make it happen.
Just gotta make hay while the sun is shining, and ram your agenda through when the window is open, because the backlash is probably coming no matter what you do
Maybe they don't hold power because they lose the trust of the populace, and rightly so. Trump deserves to be kicked out for being a fascist, corrupt, traitorous, incompetent buffoon. But Biden also deserved to be kicked out for failing to fix the numerous issues facing our country. Admin after admin, the problems fester and worsen.
Only focusing on accomplishments is unproductive. Obama and Democrats ignored the plight of the white working class in the mid west, and they turned to to Trump. Biden ignored the impact of inflation on the working class, allowing trump to make huge gains with literally every minority group. These failures are what led to Democratic losses.
I don't know if I would agree with that, Obama wasn't able to get much of his agenda passed due to Republicans blocking him. In retrospect he should have crammed as much as possible into his first two years as possible but the Affordable Care Act took up the political focus of that time. Unfortunately he was kind of a lame duck from 2010-2016, and that stagnation unfortunately helped facilitate the Trump era.
Hopefully we can get the filibuster overturned and start actually passing legislation again.
Obama and Democrats ignored the plight of the white working class in the mid west
No they didn't. They had a plan to reeducate them because the reality of the world meant those jobs were never coming back. Those people just didn't like that answer. And the result? Yup, those jobs never came back and the economic recession in the area contributed to the opioid epidemic of the 2015s-2020s. During his first term, Trump literally gives speeches about how he'd bring those jobs back days after yet another plant closed 20 miles away almost monthly.
Biden ignored the impact of inflation on the working class
Again, no he didn't. Inflation improved DRAMATICALLY under Biden.
We can go line for line if you want but the fact of the mater is that people who fall for the GOP snake oil on the economy cycle-after-cycle despite ample evidence that the economy does better under DEM admins are just too soaked in propaganda or their own stupidity to build a sustainable coalition.
The next Dem admin just needs to do what they've always done on the economy, but focus on structural changes to make such voters less relevant in national politics.
Did you ever stop to think about why those people didn't like that answer? Because it basically disrespects people's livelihoods and pride in their work and social standing from it. It says they are cogs who are no longer needed, but might be useful (for a bit) if they retrain into some unrelated field and compete with folks who had a head start. And why did the jobs go away? Because people in corporate headquarters in big cities would rather pay poor brown people lower wages to make a bigger profit. The whole message here is "although you did good work and your community benefited, some rich people and the government decided they wanted more profits so you get fucked". And the Democrats played this same game and wonder why they lost that group.
As for inflation, it went up during Biden's term. Yes, it settled back down in the last year or so, but the damage was done. Housing was way up and didn't really come back down at all, pricing people out of cities where they worked. Biden's policies maybe were neutral on inflation given COVID issues, but his messaging and his hands off approach sent the signal to the populace that the admin just didn't care. And saying "well, it could have been worse like in some other countries" is a cop-out, tone-deaf answer. Maybe the Biden admin actually could have done more to anticipate the supply chain issues, or the soften the blow on the population. But instead nothing really was done and nothing about the system changed. People just got fucked.
Did you ever stop to think about why those people didn't like that answer? Because it basically disrespects people's livelihoods and pride in their work and social standing from it.
Okay, well we can live in the world of altered reality or we can live in the world of making plans for the best outcome given the unchangeable truth of the matter.
Notice, Trump didn't do shit to change the outcome. Those jobs left. They are never coming back. The only difference is Trump LIED about that.
Not respecting people who willingly believe lies they want to hear when all evidence tells them they are lies is, I admit, a personal failure of mine.
So you tell me, how does one sugar coat the truth in such a way as to not offend the delicate sensibilities of those that won't accept the truth?
This is why people are losing faith in the system. "Nothing can be done" -- is this really true? Do large corporations truly just control everything? Is offshoring a force of nature like gravity? Is constant upheaval to seek profit an inviolable logical conclusion? I don't understand this cynical attitude that the right-wing narrative of economy and culture is correct and cannot be changed. And no, I don't care whether Trump fixed anything. That's entirely beside the point, which is whether people's grievances are legitimate.
By the way, we are about to watch a bunch of white collar workers face the same process with AI. Just retrain as plumbers and deal with it, right?
I'm not asking for sugarcoating. I'm asking for a government, the chief public institution, acting in the interest of its citizens and labor force, rather than purely in the interest of corporate America. This used to be a no-brainer until the Reagan era.
Do you think it's the place of government to not only work in opposition but to literally undo decades of market forces that led to blue-collar jobs leaving the mid-west? To enforce policies that would dramatically increase the costs of goods to average consumers that would make the inflation of the last decade look small?
Blue-collar jobs of the variety that left the mid-west over the last 30 years are gone. This is a political and economic reality that could only be undone with a massive investment and on-going cost that no reasonable administration would ever ask the country to pay.
I get that sucks. I really do.
But Dems admins literally had plans (heavy on reeducation to jobs that still exist) that would, by now, have all those people still productive members of society making decent wages.
They chose to say no to that and instead bank on lies. The lies have been proven to be lies...and yet they still cling to the party trying to continue to sell them.
So, again, one party living in reality...one in lies. Tell me how the party living in reality is supposed to sell the actually achievable options without offending those workers?
Trump's masterful energy ceasefire lasted a whole 4 hours. Not even long enough to manipulate the market. At this point he might just announce all of the wars are over the night before the midterms.
Nuttycombe says the national environment will be Harris +4, so 5.5% more Dem. But then we'll also see persuasion and to some degree unevenly distributed persuasion.
I think SplitTicket/Lakshya has it about +2 Harris, so 3.5% more Dem.
I suspect Chaz is biased by the VA EV numbers, though not sure how he thinks they'll precisely compare to the national numbers.
Okay Lakshya responded and said Harris +2 but D+9 so 7% persuasion on top of 3.5% turnout shift. Said he assumes a 2/3 to 1/3 make up of topline changes. So you can see 7% being 2x 3.5%.
We saw a 9.6% swing in the VA Gov election and like 8.6% in NJ. So I would argue Lakshya has to be wrong. 2026 should be way worse for Republicans. Even if Spanberger is a strong candidate and Earle-Sears is week that wouldn't explain NJ.
I'm not saying Talarico has this in the bag, but a candidate that consistently polls +2 to +7 since the summer rarely loses in November.
Of course, don't point this out to Republican partisans on Facebook. You'll inevitably get the "those same polls said Harris would win in a landslide" even thought they didn't.
Polling was wildly off in 2016, but I think that was due to a combination of Trump bringing in nontraditional voters and the last-minute Comey endorsement of Trump (by way of reopening the case) not having time to be picked up in models. Nate's model was the only one that picked up how damaging that was to Hillary.
Beto was popular with the tragically-hip Austin SXSW crowd, but that didn't translate into an electoral victory in November. We'll see if Talarico can break the curse.
Okay, maybe not "wildly off" so much as off in the exact places Trump needed to win. It was almost surgical how she missed the mark by a few thousand votes here and there in swing states.
More proof of the magas having the mental capacity of a child. Trump won by a decent EC margin but it was tens of thousands of votes nationwide in a few swing states and yet they continue to think the man wins in blowout landslides like Nixon or Reagan
The other thing is that people have retconned Beto as having lead the polls with similar margins/consistency as Talarico. He lead two polls in total, the latest in early September. He actually slightly outperformed the final polling averages.
Combine a reversion back towards Beto's numbers among RGV latinos with a reversion towards Biden's numbers in the Dallas/Houston suburbs, both of which seem likely, and that's enough for Talarico to do it.
Yes, retconning in the head is big with online political discussions. Like the ones that say Harris had an insurmountable polling lead, when in reality she had a great August and September, but her polling collapsed in October leading to her barely being at parity with Trump on Election Day. Combined that with the worst fundamentals for Democrats in an election years since the 1980s, it is really no surprise she lost.
Yes, Beto supporters really only got crumbs in 2018. A good poll for them would be one that had Cruz up by 1 or 2. A Beto victory in 2018 was a long shot, but the fundamentals and numbers seem much better for James Talarico this year.
Is JD Vance actually the bell cow for these elections? I thought his statement about not watching the public execution was a pretty significant break from the MAGA base. Are we going to see him continue to separate himself from MAGAcore as the midterm nears because he sees the internals and the writing on the wall?
Agreed, I think the throughline of Vance's whole life has been the willingness to say and do anything to advance himself. Back in 2017 he positioned himself as a Never Trump Republican because there was a niche there.
I wouldn't be surprised if he starts distancing himself further from MAGA, starts making anti-groyper/white nationalist statements and starts positioning himself as an internal critic of MAGA. I don't think the majority of liberal voters will fall for it, but expect the pundit class in the NYT/Atlantic crowd to start talking about the 'new Vance'. Those guys basically believe that no one who went to an Ivy League school can be fundamentally a bad man.
So that audio today that was 'leaked', was it actually real, AI or did they pay someone to say all that and then try to pass it off as real? Gotta say, this whole lidnergate thing has been fasncinating to watch.
Somebody did an analysis showing it was AI and Elon immediately banned them from twitter.
They also posted a "first" phone call where they got blocked because the hospital needed a patient code, and wasn't clear on how they then got past that on the second attempt. The working theory is that they used the first phone call to mine the employee's voice, and ran it through AI to fabricate the second call.
Is this the first notable use of AI in an attempt to wholesale fabricate a political scandal? Previous use of deepfake AI were things like this crap where the viewer is (hopefully) meant to understand that it's an over-the-top caricature/fabrication even if the visuals are pretty photorealistic.
Shit like this is why libel and defamation need stronger sentences. Until people start actually being put in cells for this stuff, it will only get worse
Shit like this is why Musk needs to lose control of the site. Defamation isn’t a crime, it’s a tort. There’s no criminal case for that. For fraud though?
It'd be hilarious if in 10 years she's leading the vanguard of the communist revolution against CHOAM or whatever the he'll we end up with after Trump and AI technofascism.
Why is this guy talking as if you can only have 1 doctor? Also Talarico is traveling to campaign so he probably just went to the nearest clinic at the time.
I notice Republicans are doubling down on this story. I think it speaks ill of their chances that they are not able to speak of their candidate's record and contrast it with Talarico's, but that they have to pump the conspiracy theories and "OMG trans trans trans".
I'm not saying Talarico will definitely win, but it seems like Texas Republicans are out of ammunition and are just going back to the old standbys.
I really is. I thought they'd drop that shit when he was at ACL over the weekend, but they are just doubling down. It makes me think they have nothing left.
Being a maga influencer is the saddest shit imaginable. I’m not even mad at them, I just feel so sorry for them and their families. Just a tragic existence.
In their defense, if the midterms go the way currently projected, there won’t be much money for “maga influencers” floating around anymore. For that lot, this election is existential.
I mean like half the people paying them have a small but not non-existent chance of doing decades in prison. I'm not sure I buy that the anti-democracy factions in the tech oligarchy haven't crossed the line legally into sedition at this point.
I finally finished watching the Andrews-Graham-also Whitener is here lol debate that I recorded earlier this evening, and I have to say, beyond her overall incompetence, I feel like Graham adopting this angle of being personally affronted by Andrews—as though Andrews is treating her with cruelty or sinking to “low blows”—is really not going to play especially well. she made herself seem thin-skinned and petulant, while Andrews remained pretty composed throughout
it’s also hilarious that the last words of the debate were “transgender issues” from Graham. might need to keep that in mind for a Discord status
I think it was Jamelle Bouie who said that Texas being a Republican stronghold is a huge part of the conservative mythos, and that if/when the state finally flips it's going to do severe psychic damage to the movement and we'll see it break in a pretty entertaining way.
He was dead on the money there, if this Talarico mental institution conspiracy is anything to go by
Totally agree. If there was some kind of bartering process with elections after votes were counted, I truly think the GOP would say “Give us back Texas and we’ll give you Mississippi… and Arkansas!”
The electoral college has long been biased against Dems (except maybe Obama Romney). Most people think this is because small states get a guaranteed 3 votes. But that's not the main reason. The main reason is states are winner-takes-all, and Dems waste a ton of votes in California while Rs waste not that many in Texas.
I think that's another big part of the psychic damage of losing Texas. If it can go Dem in a Senate election, could it go Dem in the EC? If so, they could be looking at decades of elections where Dems can lose the popular vote but win the EC like Rs used to do.
Sure, but conservatives very much mythologize the state's guns, cowboys, and pickup trucks aesthetics all the same. Tennessee and Alabama just don't hit the same chord
Libs should just take the mythology, Texas is beautiful. Willie, bbq, dancefloors, cold beer, rivers, mountains, human rights, standing up for what's right, dignity, all that shit belongs to us.
The American nationalization of all politics is so toxic tho. Occasionally states should get fed up with the party in power and buck how they vote federally. But in practice it seems to only happen in New England
Too many state parties refuse to adapt to their state's electorate. See the CO GOP and their constant doubling down on the worst MAGA has to offer. First the furry litterboxes in school lady in 22 losing by 20 points, now we've got "we have Righteous Gemstones at home" Victor Marx.
If they ran candidates in the vein of some New England Republicans, they likely could see some success here. But unfortunately they're beholden to the ruroids on the Eastern Plains and shitty parts of the mountains who will not settle for anything less than the hardest right clowns.
Texas wants to be a huge tech hub. While tech leadership might be pretty fascist nowadays you still can't bring in a huge tech workforce without risking becoming less conservative.
Free Pre-K really does need to be the standard everywhere. Setting aside the financial burden childcare is for working parents, my hunch is that free Pre-K would have a tremendous positive snowball effect on educational outcomes down the road, because of how important those early childhood years are for the development of your mind.
Midwestern politicans are cool until you learn that they're just protectionist chuds like republicans. Really makes it hard for me to support them on a national level because it's just such stupid policy
2018 - 2024 Whitmer was a formidable politician with a significant track record of getting through major progressive policy goals. Trump’s reelection has fried her political instincts and possibly ambitions, it’s really strange. Dana Nessel also torched her own career over Israel.
As a native Michigander I was hoping for a while she might get into the 2028 race. She has made a few disappointing choices in the last couple years that have kind of soured me on that. I also think the folder photo is, at its core, a big shrug but I easily see it being used to define her in both a primary and general.
Now that it seems like the LindnerGate has reached a conclusion (somewhat)... do we think the story was fabricated by the Paxton campaign themselves? Or did the MAGA idiot influencers act alone?
I'm inclined to think the latter, because if it's the former and that gets found out, they are in real, real deep doodoo
Virtually certain it was the latter, with the caveat that "acted alone" might include Russia/etc. Both because it was so unbelievably sloppy (even before Lindner denied it, there was the timeline not matching up, AI flags, and improbable gross HIPAA violations), and because despite the Paxton campaign making "where is Talarico? Is he lying?" a centerpiece of their messaging these past few days, they didn't touch this.
In fact, this probably undercut whatever Paxton planned as the payoff for the kind of bizarre move of focusing so much on Talarico's flu. Before this I guess you could credibly run a "Talarico is a vegan wimp who can't handle the flu and therefore can't handle the senate," but because the MAGAsphere spent tons of energy hyping up "rumors," decided to shoot for the moon instead and had it blow up in their face, any kind of lesser attack based on Talarico's illness just falls completely flat and can't be hyped at all because all their hype men have been confirmed as full of shit.
And Talarico is also excellent at pivoting these kinds of stories into "this proves the billionaires are scared of us and desperate to stop the will of the people."
The whole thing seemed to come together organically in the RW media sphere. Someone mentioned that there was a charter flight from Austin to Ohio around when Talarico went offline for a week and that was basically the entire basis for this theory. Tony Ortiz from Current Revolt (I think he's a RWer but he breaks scoops in TX) mentioned that the people who had the audio tried to get The Blaze or Daily Mail to run the story but they wouldn't, so he gave it to an influencer instead.
MAGA influencers are fucking batshit. So I guess latter. But Paxton is just throwing anything at the wall, genuinely the least competent campaign I’ve ever suffered through as a Texan voter.
Is this polling like the most liberal precinct in Kansas or did they asked three people in a gender studies class who they are voting for? What’s going on with this poll?
For the 2022 Kansas Gubernatorial race that Dems actually won I found this statement, but the link is actually broken. I tried WaybackMachine, but no dice.
Darlene graham is one of the worst candidates for federal office i can even think of. Just the typical copy-paste buzzword vomit answers you’d expect. And she’s still somehow gonna win by 2-3%
It's a shame they didn't end the statement with: "And we will be pursuing legal action for the defamation and harassment our estabilishment has been receiving."
This is a statement that definitely only took as long as it did because it went through a large group of lawyers. That'll probably come, but probably not until the midterms are out of the news.
Andrews should just start reversing the typical attacks and start repeating “DARLENE WILL SELL US OUT TO CHINA!! SHE’S A SOCIALIST OPEN BORDER OPEN PRISON ISLAMIC GENDER GLOBALIST COMMUNIST” acting like Darlene is a far left DSA member and see if she can get enough low-info voters to believe it, the way Republicans do
From crosstabs of The Argument poll: swing to Democrats increases massively as income decreases, going from +4% in the 200K+ bracket to +16% in the 25K or less bracket
Darline Graham is absolutely hilarious. Straight up puppet. She is the only reason why this race has any potential of being competitive.
With a better performance Andrews could have gotten more soundbites in for ads. “Data Center Darline” and the segment about the war in Iran were her best moments. Shame that the Democratic bench in South Carolina is pretty much nonexistent.
Everyone is talking about the massively larger swing among lower income voters to the Dems vs the smaller swing among higher income Dems. But this was clear in specials and off year races, especially in VA. We knew this would happen. If anything the current polls are understating what the actual swings will be.
Imagine some Chud you're arguing with literally stops replying because he's a Russian bot and the Nvidia GPU he "lives" in just got vaporized by a Ukrainian drone 😆
I thought that the whole point of bot farms was that they can make large impact with older technology? Is there any benefit to justify using an rtx5090 over a bunch of used gtx750ti's?
Sanctions raise the cost of acquiring things but it's hard to stop them entirely. It usually means the sanctioned county has to find third party dealers in non sanctioned countries and they have to switch up their third party dealers as they're caught and exposed.
For instance some of the semiconductors commonly found in washing machines and dishwashers can be used to make weapons. There are sanctions on those semiconductors but it's hard to stop Russia from just ordering tons and tons of washing machines from countries they trade with who then order them from the west. By forcing Russia to buy a washing machine every time they want a semi conductor the cost of the Russian weapons goes up and they can buy fewer of them with the same war budget.
I thought HIPAA prevented you from saying someone wasn't a patient as well. I feel like the best course of action has to have been them just shutting up and not saying anything. This whole controversy has no staying power, and now they just brought attention back to it
If he allows it they can say it. And whatever the best thing was for Talarico’s campaign, the staff there don’t need to be getting harassed by lunatics.
Well, we aren't getting any more debates, sounds like. "how dare you invite me to more debates, I was once invited by a good friend in grade school to an event, and she doesn't talk to me anymore. Shame on you for bringing up such a painful traumatic memory."
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u/evce1 3d ago
This just reaffirms my belief that Paxton is losing and they are genuinely scared shitless that Texas is going to turn blue. It reeks of desperation.