The Six Lessons of the 2026 Midterms

0:05Derek Thompson: 10 years ago this week, Donald Trump stunned the world to win the 2016 presidential election. On Tuesday, in his final midterm, the Republican Party suffered a historic collapse. And the following day, Trump's own vice president publicly brainstormed ways to distance himself from his own administration's agenda. Now, while I think it might take years to understand exactly what Trump has done to this country, I want to make the case that the Trump decade is over. 2016 to 2026, that's it. What follows, I think, is going to be a near lame duck period, an era of undefined chaos. And I personally am still in a state of shock looking at the maps redrawn by Tuesday's results.

0:51Derek Thompson: Democrats did not just win the House by the largest margin in decades. James Tallarico won a Senate seat in Texas by 12 points. That's more than Kamala Harris carried in sky blue states like Illinois or New Jersey in 2024. John Ossoff won his reelection in Georgia by 18 points. That's more than the Harris 24 margin in Connecticut or New York State. In Kansas, where no Democrat had won a Senate seat since the Great Depression, Adam Hamilton won comfortably. In Mississippi, Scott Colum won in a state that Trump recently carried by 23 points. When commentators sometimes say, I don't recognize this country, they almost always mean it in a bad way.

1:38Derek Thompson: But honestly, in my frazzled state of disbelief, I am genuinely finding it hard to wrap my mind around an election result where Kansas voted like it's New Hampshire, where Mississippi voted like Wisconsin. And then there's the president. Donald Trump is now the least popular second-term president. At this point in his term since 1948, he's overseen the largest midterm wipeout in at least 50 years. The problem with Trump is not simple. It's not just that he's a bad president whose final pitch to voters involved talking endlessly about the shape of men's butts and the ins and outs of White House renovations.

2:18Derek Thompson: It's not just that he's devoted himself to corrupt self-enrichment, spending his afternoons coding the White House ballroom in gold leaf while Americans struggle to afford gas. It's not just that Americans increasingly oppose every single policy priority of this administration. It's not just that he responded to frustrations about border control by dialing up a brutal immigration enforcement policy that destroyed all of his gains among Hispanic voters. It's not just that he won a cost of living election in 2024 and then moved immediately to raise import prices with a historic tariff regime and then followed that up by sending gas and diesel prices higher by invading Iran in a military action that, by the way, at once violated two campaign promises, to do something about high prices and to do nothing regarding military involvement in the Middle East.

3:07Derek Thompson: No, the deeper problem is that on top of all of that, the man just plain sucks at candidate selection. Trump pushed out popular conservative senators in Texas and North Carolina for their insufficient loyalty to the regime, and then backed horrendous wannabes that gave Democrats a chance to win in parts of the country, where not even the most hopium-addled lib would have dreamed about winning back in January of 2025. That Donald Trump is a unique political talent cannot be denied. But what kind of political talent is he really? The president is now 2-0 running as an outsider trying to wrest the presidency from Democratic hands, 2016, 2024.

3:53Derek Thompson: But he's 0-3 in elections where he is already the sitting president. 2018, 2020, and now 2026. In an age of anti-incumbency, Trump is the epitome of the incumbent curse. He is a generational genius of charismatic negativity who has no idea what to do with the reins of power once he actually seizes them, other than marshaled the machinery of the federal government to drive public opinion against everything he wants. And yet, to slow my roll here, I think it would be a mistake to say that the midterms represent some kind of new realignment in politics. I think this is more like a very whiplashy midterm.

4:41Derek Thompson: Young voters and Hispanics swung dramatically toward Trump in 2024, only to swing back even harder in 2026. The sign, I think, of this pendulum swinging is that the middle of America is extremely liquid. Millions of people are changing their minds about the parties every 18 months. We're in some kind of molten moment in American politics where both parties, I believe, have been discredited by recent elections. And that means the identity of both parties is ready to be shaped by new voices. Today's guest is Nate Cohn, the New York Times chief political analyst who helps run the widely respected Times Siena poll, and of course brought us the election needle, for better or for worse.

5:27Derek Thompson: We talk about the art of polling and the origin of that infamous needle, but mostly we talk about what the hell just happened, what it means, and why 2028 will be a head-to-head contest among two headless parties. In the end, we focus on six lessons of the midterms, the pendulum swings of the youth vote, The death of the Trump coalition, the revival of the swing voter, the identity death of the Republican Party, the limits of money in politics, and finally the historical analogies over the last 100 years that should shape our understanding of what happens next after a midterm that so dramatically rejects the incumbent.

6:09Derek Thompson: I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English.

6:42Derek Thompson: This episode is brought to you by Jira by Atlassian. Your work is scattered. A thread here, a DM there, five different docs related to the same project. And now it's not just your team hunting for context. It's your AI agents too. Jira taps Atlassian's teamwork graph to bring that context together across Jira, Confluence, Slack, GitHub, and more. It makes it easy to share with the agents you already use like Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot. Assign them work directly or connect your agents through MCP. The result, less token waste, more accuracy, and more time moving work forward. Learn more at jira.com.

7:18Derek Thompson: That's J-I-R-A dot com. This episode is brought to you by JPMorgan Chase. In today's unpredictable world, geopolitics isn't just a backdrop. It's shaping markets, business strategy, and risk. The JPMorgan Chase Center for Geopolitics brings together former senior policymakers and seasoned practitioners to translate fast-moving global events into clear, decision-ready insights. From conflict and great power competition to energy and supply chain disruption, the center helps clients anticipate what comes next. Read the latest insights at jpmorganchase.com slash center for geopolitics. Nate Cohn, welcome to the show.

7:59Derek Thompson: Derek, thanks for having me. You ever see what might be one of the most respected polling outfits in the country? There are forecasters like Nate Silver who give more weight to the New York Times Siena poll than any other poll in the country. Let's just start big picture. How does this outcome fit with your highly respected forecasts? Well, it came very close to our final polls. You know, the last polls that we released on the Sunday before the election had the Democrats tied her head in the seven closest Senate contests with an average leave of five points across those races. And as of this hour, the Democrats are tied her head in all seven of those races with only Alaska outstanding and the Democrats ahead by an average of five points.

8:38So to be honest, you know, our polls are never going to be perfect. but we can't really do much better than that. Interestingly, if you look a little further back, say three weeks ago, our polls are a little worse for Democrats compared to the final result. And if you look in September, they're even farther back. So if you look back over the course of our polling over the cycle, there's a very clear trend towards the Democrats and that sort of finishes with this late surge in our final wave of polls that ultimately ends in a Democratic landslide.

9:05Derek Thompson: As someone who spent literally a thousand times more time obsessing about the midterms than I have in the last few months, I really want to know what was your holy shit moment from Tuesday or what's the holy shit result from Tuesday that you still can't quite wrap your head around? Because when I look at this map right now, I think like I wrote earlier this week, it's an America that I don't recognize. And typically when people say, I don't recognize this country, 99.9 % of the time they mean it in a bad way. You know, as a liberal, I mean this in a good way. But like, I don't recognize this map.

9:42Derek Thompson: It looks like a map from another century. What's the biggest holy shit moments here? Well, in terms of the way I experienced it on election night, the first holy shit moment was around 720, 730 when we got our first little bit of data from South Carolina. I think everyone sort of knew that Florida could be a reasonably close race. Florida has been a reasonably close state before. But those first results came in from South Carolina and every one of them, whether it was election day voter, absentee voter, early voter from majority black areas or white areas. It was all better than what Annie Andrews, the Democrat, needed to beat Darlene Graham.

10:17And it was like, well, that's a different tier of Democratic breakthrough than we've had in the past. It's like their best case scenario to get not just into those districts or states that voted for Trump by 12 or 13 points like Ohio or Texas or Florida, but 17 or 18 points like South Carolina and soon it seems Mississippi. So that for me was the real moment when it was clear that we weren't just dealing with any big blue wave, but the biggest big blue wave that we've seen in a half century. Stepping even later in the night, 10 or 11 p.m., finally stepping back from those key Senate races once it was clear that we could call the Senate and looking at the House for the first time in a while.

10:53Seeing those gerrymandered congressional districts in North Carolina and Tennessee that were drawn to be Trump plus 20 and that no one would have given a thought to, all too close to call, or in some cases even leaning Democratic. That was, again, an extraordinarily vivid illustration of how the Democrats had broken through the usual political fault lines in America.

11:16Derek Thompson: I want to zoom into specific demographic groups, men and women, old versus young, college non-college. Where are the biggest shifts toward the Democratic Party between 2024 and the midterm of 26? The biggest swings are among the young and non-white voters who swung toward Donald Trump in the last presidential election, but who then snapped back towards the Democrats very early in Donald Trump's second term. Among Latino voters, we have the Democrats leading by 40 points right now, 69 to 29. That's up from a 10-point win for Kamala Harris in 2024. So that's nearly a 30-point swing. A story similar among young voters, we have Democrats at 70 percent of young voters.

12:00Again, that was less than 10 points by our estimates in 2024. So that's more than a 30 point swing toward the Democrats. Democrats. It's also worth noting that in these cases, they're not just bringing the Democrats back to where Joe Biden was in 2020, but they give Democrats an even larger lead than, say, Barack Obama had among young voters in 2008 or 2012, which we might think of as being the highest point of Democratic support among those groups in recent memory. After that, then basically everyone else also swings 10 points towards the Democrats. So there's both this enormous snapback where the Democrats win all of the voters that they lost and then across the board, additional gains.

12:39And the end result is that many traditionally Republican constituencies also end up being strikingly good for the Democrats, even beyond the traditionally Democratic ones, like young and non-white voters, who I was just referring to. We have the Democrats tied our head among men. We have the Democrats at 40 % of white working class voters. We have Democrats leading among voters who don't have a college degree. These just aren't things we've seen in a long time.

13:00Derek Thompson: If I recall, Democrats have not won men in a presidential election since the 1970s. I'll be honest, I don't even know. I think Jimmy Carter might be the last Democrat to win the mail vote in a presidential year, which just gives you a sense of how extraordinarily blue this electorate was. And yeah, sorry, go on. No, I was going to say, you know, I had a lot of historic stats prepared ahead of the election to be ready for this is the biggest since 2008 or 1982 or 1976. And for the demographic groups, you know, I had a lot prepared black voters, Latino voters, young voters. I didn't have men on the list.

13:39I should have perhaps. But it's an illustration again that as you know, all the polls, I think, were basically in the ballpark. It was still sort of hard to really imagine what it might mean for them to be right.

13:48Derek Thompson: As not only a pollster here, but also a historian of polls. What's the best comp for this midterm? Is it 2006? Is it 1970 something? What are we looking at? I, you know, I don't think that 2006 and 2008 work. The Democrats won in 2006 by eight points. They won by 10 in 2008. And the Democrats are on track for 13 or 14. So that's for some perspective. That's like the difference between 2020 and 2026. Now on top again, you know, we're just talking about an entire new tier of Democratic breakthroughs. And that's most vividly illustrated in the red states. In 2006 and 2008, the Democrats only managed to win, I believe, three states that Trump won by double digits across those two elections combined in the U.S.

14:34Senate. The Democrats are on track to win six or seven at this point. So they are making more gains in Red America than they made in two elections combined and then maybe doubling it. So this is just an extraordinary. This is on a different level. After that, I think you have to go to the post-Watergate election in 1974. The Democrats won the House vote by 17 in that election. But it's worth noting that that was also in an era when the South was solidly Democratic. And a lot of that lead in the national popular vote was not necessarily indicative of their overall strength elsewhere in the country.

15:07And I think you have to start asking about the really big all time, you know, landslides as being the next comparisons. I don't think this is really comparable to 1964 or 1936 or something like that. I think it's in a tier below that still. The Democrats were winning by 20 in those elections. But it's in a space that's past the usual decisive victories of the last half century, if still probably a little less than the all-time great wins.

15:31Derek Thompson: I remember having a conversation with Nate Silver a couple weeks ago. We were talking about how a rule of the 21st century has been close election, close election, close election. Like, yes, you've seen thermostatic swings where a president wins, and then in the midterm, he loses a few votes, and then maybe in the next election, they win something. But it just goes to show how extraordinary this election is, that it is on the level of something like 1974, even though the 21st century has been an era of much closer elections. I want to slow down on young voters in particular as we talk about the demographic shifts.

16:08Derek Thompson: Because after 2020, young people and young men especially swung toward the Republican Party. And many analysts, myself included, covered this shift as a grave omen for Democrats who seem to be losing a generation of young people, possibly forever given the historical fact that young people's ideological preferences do tend to calcify in their 20s and 30s. But Nate, you just told me that young people swung more than 30 points back to Democrats between 2024 and 2026. What does that tell us about the youth vote? I also just want to add that we have the Democrats winning more than 60 percent of young men, which is a disproportionate swing.

16:50We had Democrats at four. I think we had Trump winning young men by 15 points in 2024, give or take. So that's a 45 point swing or more among that group. It's Jesus. It's an extraordinary change from just a few years ago. And it's worth noting, I'm not sure that the analysis that people had after 2020 and 2024 about young voters was wrong. It's just so happens that the president followed up with it. It just so happened that the president turned out to be one of the least popular presidents in the era of modern polling. He who's less popular into this election, according to national polls, than any since Harry Truman in 1946.

17:25And young voters disapproved of him more than any other age group. And you can choose your own adventure in terms of which explanation you prefer most, whether it's the economy or whether it's the war in Iran or whether it's the corruption and even the Epstein files tying him to the detested Washington establishment. You can come with any explanation you want, and I think it has some validity to it. this kind of total collapse takes many independent factors all accumulating. And this, when you not only look at it in terms of young voters, but the electorate overall, it's just a total collapse in the Republican coalition, right?

18:01There's nothing left here. And for that to happen, the president had to get it wrong in basically every respect.

18:11Derek Thompson: Devin, I want to show people that are watching us on Spotify and YouTube, some of the U-turns that the electorate took when you zoom in on specific demographics like men and young voters and Hispanics in particular. Between 2020 and 2024, a lot of these groups swung toward Republicans and then they swung all the way back. And that's why I'm describing these as sort of like U-turns. Men shifted 17 points toward Democrats. Black voters shifted back toward Democrats. Hispanics, obviously young voters. But I really want to make sure, Nate, that we're careful about explaining what happened here, because it's tempting to say that what happened is millions of Americans changed their mind.

18:52Derek Thompson: It's as simple as that. But this was not the exact same electorate as 2024. Midterms bring out different kinds of people, often bring out more engaged voters. Do we know how much of this U-turn was caused by persuasion or people changing their minds? That young, you know, 24-year-old Joe Rogan listener who voted for Trump and then immediately soured on him versus turnout. Maybe that guy just stayed at home. And so the resulting electorate was more liberal. How much of this U-turn phenomenon was persuasion versus turnout? It's always both. And the data we have so far suggests it's both. If I had to pick a number out of a hat today, I'll go with two thirds to three quarters persuasion.

19:40OK. And I'll give you a few of the illustrations on both sides of the ledger here. We know exactly who voted early in a lot of these states. We know in Texas exactly who the 7.6 million people were who voted early. According to our estimates, those were people that voted for Trump by six points. And those estimates are pretty good. They're based on a lot of information, like where these people lived and whether they voted in Democratic or Republican primaries. And James Tallarico won that Trump plus six group by, I think, 12 points. So that's an extraordinary swing. That story repeats itself basically everywhere we have data, including in the states where Democrats didn't fare that well, like Florida.

20:20It's very clear that Democrats did much better than the proportion of early voters who would have backed Kamala Harris in the last election. But flipping on the other side of the ledger, though, it's also very clear that Republican turnout isn't what it usually is with respect to Democratic turnout. That's especially true among young voters. Young Republicans did not show up in this election. Now, I don't think you can assume that if they had shown up, that they would have voted Republican. All of the polls showed basically the same result, regardless of whether they were polling only the people who were voters or all registered voters or adults.

20:53These people didn't vote because they were dissatisfied, and that dissatisfaction could have led to a Democratic vote if they had come to the polls. But there's no doubt that if this had only been the 2024 electorate, that the Democrats would have done better, rather that the Republicans would have done better. I'll add, though, that in addition to Republicans leaving the electorate, we shouldn't ignore that there were a ton of new voters who entered the electorate. probably more than 10 % of the electorate in the Senate battleground states didn't vote in 2024. And by our estimates, they voted two to one for the Democrats.

21:27So that's a third option besides the ones that you offered, right? There's a scenario where voters flip to the Democrats. We see tons of evidence of that. There are cases where Republicans stay home. We see some evidence of that. And if you're a Republican, you can hope to change that one in the future. But the idea that there's a whole new cohort of young and non-white voters who were previously frustrated with the Democrats but are now energized to show up and oppose Donald Trump is a big problem for them heading into 2028.

21:54Derek Thompson: I want to hold on this theme of things that we thought were true about America in 2024 that might not necessarily be true about America in 2026. After the last election, we heard a lot about racial realignment. Trump won a surprising number of black voters. He won a surprising number of Hispanic voters. He won a surprising number of young black, Hispanic, Asian voters. All these groups bounce back to Democrats in 2026. Was the racial realignment fake? Well, I think that the racial realignment presented President Trump with an opportunity to cement some kind of conservative populist coalition that was more working class, younger and more diverse than any previous Republican coalition.

22:38If he had focused on the issues that got him over the top in that election, like reducing prices, restoring border security and avoiding the excesses of his policies that we've seen instead, who knows what would have happened? I think we've seen across the post-industrial world that this brand of conservative populism has broad appeal among working class, younger and non-white voters. And the challenge is just whether in office you can make good on the promises and hopes that that brand of politics raises for people. And not only did Donald Trump fail to live up to those promises, but he did he sort of did everything he could to systematically dismantle that coalition, whether by attacking Iran or with his deportation policy.

23:23We can go down the list. We don't need to recapitulate at all. And the net effect is that not only did he lose all of his gains, but he but he alienated even even more than that.

23:32Derek Thompson: sticking on this theme of myths that might have been exposed by Tuesday's vote. In the 2010s and 2020s, there was this very powerful, very common argument running through American political commentary that the swing voter was an extinct species, that persuasion was becoming less important, that elections were increasingly these contests of mobilization between these fixed entities of Democratic versus Republican voters. But the U-turns that you've portrayed in this electorate seem to totally explode the idea that the swing voter is extinct. Am I right in seeing your work and seeing the 2026 election as being evidence that that the death of the swing voter is, in fact, an enormous myth in American political science?

24:26It's an enormous myth. And it's it's been wrong for a long time, Derek. I mean, despite the stability in the overall result in our elections, there has been a tremendous amount of upheaval beneath the surface. And those have mostly canceled out, like when Donald Trump surged among white working class voters in 2016, while Democrats had an equal and opposite improvement among white college graduates. Or in 2020, when Donald Trump began to make these gains among Hispanic voters that then continued in 2024, while Democrats were making even greater gains in the opposite direction among older white voters.

24:58I mean, these changes are very easy to miss if you are looking at a consistent D plus two, D plus four, D plus five, whatever election result. But when you look at it in terms of demographic groups, counties, individual voters, congressional districts, there have been enormous changes over the last 15 years. And I think that those changes actually laid the groundwork in many ways to get a landslide because so many voting blocs have been set into motion during the Trump era that once some of those pieces began to fall one way, the opportunity to win in a blow had actually emerged. Like, think about it like this.

25:33Donald Trump destroyed the Republican coalition as we once knew it in 2016. He destroyed it. And the white college educated voters in the Sunbelt and in suburbs across the country that had been the anchor of that party in the 20th century were now competitive or Democrats. He replaced it with a new coalition that was working class, younger and non-white in time, especially by 2024, relatively less likely to vote, disengaged against the system. And then once he alienated those voters over the last two years, the Republicans were left with nothing. They didn't have their old coalition or the new one.

26:10And now it's a landslide. and I you know it was not inevitable that Donald Trump would manage to alienate his coalition so completely or that the satisfaction it's also worth knowing a third group in there there are voters who have gone along with Trump all along that were sort of part of that traditional coalition you can think of them archetypally as like a Rubio or Haley voter right they this is not Donald Trump is not what they wanted but they stayed on the Trump bus for the last 10 years even though it was like a kind of an awkward and uncomfortable ride for them and they got off the bus on Tuesday And you can see that in these reliably conservative metropolitan areas.

26:44Greenville, South Carolina. These aren't the places of, you know, the old conservative elite. This is a more, there are certainly plenty of college graduates there, but this is not, these aren't, you know, extraordinarily affluent or highly educated areas that we think of as part of like the cosmopolitan global economy necessarily, like New York or even Dallas and Houston. This is another tier of metro area where the Democrats almost never break through. And they had big breakthroughs in places like that because this segment of the Republican Party that has stuck with Trump all along also bolted.

27:19So that's sort of what I think takes you from like a D plus 11 victory to D plus 14. But either way, all of these pieces, all of these pieces being in motion creates the conditions for them all ultimately to sway one way and get a result we haven't seen in a long time.

27:32Derek Thompson: I want to turn to talk about polling in just a second, but I want to round out this section by sort of reviewing what I think I'm learning here, which is that Donald Trump has made the American electorate a lot more liquid than we thought it would be. There was this assumption that the American electorate was these two fixed entities. There were Democrats and there were Republicans, and every election was a battle of mobilization. It was just turnout. But Trump not only reformed the Republican coalition, he also created this sort of like molten middle where Hispanics are swinging toward Trump in 2024 and then racing back toward Democrats in 26.

28:08Derek Thompson: Same with young people. And as a result, a lot of things that we thought were true about the electorate turned out to not necessarily be true. We thought that, I'll say, I thought that young men were swinging permanently toward Donald Trump. In fact, that was wrong. A lot of people said there was going to there was a racial realignment toward Donald Trump. That turned out to be wrong. A lot of people said this was a working class revolt against Democrats and the working class would never come back to the Democratic Party. That seems to be partly wrong. We thought that the swing voter was nixing species.

28:37Derek Thompson: That seems to be partly wrong. Are there other shibboleths, other popular conceptions about politics and voting in the 21st century that you think have been exposed by the last few elections? I think you've you covered enough there that I'm going to struggle to come up with with an additional one, Derek. I think, though, that the idea that American that there are no swing voters is grounded in an assumption that I think is pretty clearly wrong when you think about what's happened over the last 20 years, which is that politics always offers the same choices to voters. And it doesn't. Like the things that our politics have, the things that we've been arguing about in American politics are totally different than they were in 2008 when we were talking about, you know, the Iraq war or same-sex marriage and, you know, the religious right was what embodied the conservative base.

29:27It's a completely different political debate nowadays about new issues. And when you present the public with a new set of choices, as Donald Trump and just the last decade in general absolutely have, you'll get voters making a different choice.

29:39Derek Thompson: This episode is brought to you by JPMorgan Chase. In today's unpredictable world, geopolitics isn't just a backdrop. It's shaping markets, business strategy, and risk. The JPMorgan Chase Center for Geopolitics brings together former senior policymakers and seasoned practitioners to translate fast-moving global events into clear, decision-ready insights. From conflict and great power competition to energy and supply chain disruption, the center helps clients anticipate what comes next. Read the latest insights at jpmorganchase.com slash center for geopolitics. This episode is brought to you by Workday.

30:20Derek Thompson: Guessing is for game shows, not for your business, especially when your margin for error is zero. Workday is the enterprise AI platform for HR, finance, and IT with a deep understanding of your organization's context and guardrails. So every AI action is permission aware, giving you accuracy 24 seven and the ability to not just get work done, but get it done right. It's a new workday. This episode is brought to you by Jira by Atlassian. Your work is scattered. A thread here, a DM there, five different docs related to the same project. And now it's not just your team hunting for context, it's your AI agents too.

31:01Derek Thompson: Jira taps into Atlassian's teamwork graph to bring that context together across Jira, Confluence, Slack, GitHub, and more, and makes it easy to share with the agents you already use, like Claude Cursor and GitHub Copilot. Assign them work directly or connect your agents through Atlassian MCP. The result? Less token waste, more accuracy, and more time moving forward. Learn more at jira.com. That's J-I-R-A dot com. I want to talk about polls for a second. I think a lot of liberals woke up on Wednesday thinking the polls were right because the Democratic wave materialized. But the polls also missed the scale of Democrats' victory by several points.

31:48Derek Thompson: I wonder how you evaluate the quality of polls this cycle. Well, I think that the polls had a mixed cycle. I mean, they're never perfect, and this is no exception. I think that you can certainly point to some pollsters, and I think we're on this list, who basically captured the size of the wave for Democrats at the end, at least. I think that is also a modest excuse for pollsters who polled a few weeks ago and showed good results for Democrats, but maybe not ones that are great. I think it's pretty clear if you just take the friendlines in our polling in totality that this race steadily trended towards the Democrats over the final month.

32:20But there is another group of pollster that was polling to the end and that never showed the magnitude of the Democratic victory. pollsters that showed tight races in all of the key Senate races like Texas or Ohio. The reason that they have gotten it wrong is because they're trying to find tools to account for the tendency of polls to miss Donald Trump supporters, which is absolutely a legitimate problem. Donald Trump supporters are less likely to respond to polls. But if the way that you address it is with a heavy handed technique that forces the electorate into being something it may not be in a given year, then you may have badly overcorrected.

33:02And I think that there is a big class of pollsters this year who have adopted such heavy handed techniques that they basically were unable to detect large enough swings in the electorate. The most noted, I think the clearest way to, I think the clearest form of this are the polls that were basically waiting to a 2024 electorate, where they made sure that in their polls in a state like Texas or Ohio, that the number of people who said they voted for Donald Trump would match the proportion who actually voted for him in 2024. And that's not what this electorate was. There were many Trump voters, as we mentioned, who've stayed home.

33:37There are also a lot of Trump voters who I don't think were willing to say they voted, supported him anymore. And when you put those things together, if a pollster was, you know, ensuring that their poll had a Trump plus 13 electorate in Ohio, they're probably going to be wrong.

33:48Derek Thompson: I want to understand how the New York Times-Siena poll seems to be among the best at capturing the electorate, both in heavy turnout years and in midterms. I almost don't even know what the right question to ask here is, even though what I really want to understand is like, your word was technique. What is the hardest, most important thing about making a poll that's reflective, is it finding the right people to call or is it some fine-tuning process of the panel after you've called those people? Like, what's the bottleneck to, like, making a truly excellent poll? The truth is that it's both. There was a time 20 years ago where the only thing you needed to do to have a great survey was take a random sample of the population.

34:41And if you did that, you'd be in the ballpark. Unfortunately, response rates to surveys have plunged and our country has also become more polarized along lines of political engagement and social participation in ways that mean that maybe even 20 years ago, the polls would have been wrong if they were polling about Donald Trump. We don't know that for sure. He wasn't around back then, but I think we should be open to that possibility. And this deep problem in the sampling means that pollsters now absolutely need to rely on some kind of statistical technique to make sure that their samples are representative of the voters who supported Donald Trump in prior elections.

35:22The question is how you do that. And I think there are really two basic choices that pollsters can make. One is to try and weight polls in ways that are grounded in things that you know are facts. So let me give you an example. We know in the state of Texas that, I'm going to make up a number here, 30 % of people have previously participated in a Republican primary to 20 % who have previously participated in a Democratic primary. If you do that, you are ensuring that your poll matches something that is just a ground truth about the electorate. That is safe in one level, but it may not be enough.

35:58Imagine, for instance, if the Republicans who you get are just the Nikki Haley voters. Now you may have the right number of Republicans, but you may not have the Trump supporters. If your sample is so bad that even that level of adjustment is insufficient, then you have to consider options that actually involve taking a lot of risks. Where you're actually adjusting your polls to things that you don't know are true. Where you say, okay, in Texas I know that Donald Trump won by 13 points. and while I don't know that that will be the electorate this time, that makes my result plausible. And if I didn't do this, Tallarico would be up 20.

36:36So I better wait to Trump plus 13 and I don't know what else to do. There are a lot of pollsters who have reached that point that the data that they're collecting on the front end is so poor that they don't really have a choice but to engage in like the most heavy-handed style of correction possible. I think the Times-Ciena poll is unique on both of these fronts. We are still a telephone poll. They're really expensive. Every time we consider the alternatives, the data is worse. The other data is more highly educated. They're only people who vote. They're extremely democratic. I understand why any pollster who is collecting the data that I see when I test out other methods feels like they have to do these heavy-handed results that make the kind of myths we saw yesterday, like, not just likelier, but essentially inevitable in some election or another.

37:20On the other hand, I think we also go further in making those kind of factual adjustments than other pollsters do. One thing that we do that I'm not sure if any other public pollster does, maybe even there may not even be any private pollsters who do, is we estimate for every person in the country. And this is what underpins the demographic estimates we've been talking about, by the way, how likely they are to have voted for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris based on, again, the hard things we know about them. Some of those things I've already talked about, like their party. That's a pretty good clue about whether you voted.

37:53But we have more data than that, too. We know the value of their home. We know their address, after all. And anyone can go on Trulia and see the value of someone's home, so we know that. That helps us know not just if you're a Republican, but if you're, you know, a well-to-do Republican, who we know to be likelier to dissent from Trump. In some cases, we know someone's car. And yeah, if you have an F350, like you're more conservative than someone with an F150 and more conservative than someone who drives a Honda Civic and more conservative than someone who drives a Prius. We don't know that about too many people.

38:18But we know it about some. And when you take all of the data at our disposal, we can do a better job, at least not a perfect job, but a better job of making sure that we don't just have the right number of Republicans, but like the right kind of Republicans to the extent possible. So the Times Canada poll calls me. Yeah. You're going to ask me what car I drive? You're going to ask where I live? Oh, so how are you getting the car and. Oh, this is important. I should have said that. Maybe it's because I'm so tired that I didn't say this essential part. But our polls, like most polls conducted by campaign, but not necessarily most public polls, are drawn from lists of registered voters.

38:52Under federal law, every state has to produce a list of registered voters. That includes basically all of the information that you provided in your state when you registered to vote, but not like your social security number. That information is the foundation for basically everything that you see in our operation, whether it's the Times-Siena poll, the demographic estimates we've been looking at, the needle. this data can be um augmented with additional data so we know your address right i can find out where you live what how valuable your home is on trulia um or we and by the way i should note that we don't do all of this ourselves that there's a company called l2 this political data provider that's does a lot of this stuff on for for us um they can find out you know if you have a if you have a doctor's license.

39:36If there's a Derek Thompson who lives at your address and has a medical license, now we know you're a doctor. And we can do this for a lot of different things that each in their own way help us build a more sophisticated understanding of whether you're the kind of voter who's representative of the population or maybe a different way of looking at whether you're the kind of voter we need to give more or less weight to when we get our responses back.

39:59Derek Thompson: it's really interesting last question methodology um you are famous and in some circles infamous uh for the new york times needle and while some people um who are uh cretins uh don't like the needle uh well-respecting people understand uh that the needle is god um the needle is is our lord and savior it's a really really interesting valuable tool that to my mind has proven and shockingly accurate. I want to understand how the needle works. But even more than that, I want to understand what the origin story of the needle is. Who is the needle's mother or father? Who came, was there a meeting where someone came in and was like, we need an odds needle at the New York Times that tells us what chance a certain person has to win an election and what the margin is going to be.

40:56Derek Thompson: So where did the needle come from And, you know, without going into like a 15 minute explanation, like how does it work? So when I many people who were part of the Upshot at its founding independently had an idea like this when the Upshot was founded at the Times in early 2014, I had it in my job application. When I was at the New Republic, this is sort of a horrifying story. On election night in 2012, I had like every reporter researcher entering results into a spreadsheet because, you know, we didn't buy the election results that then I was trying to process and generate estimates for what would happen at the final outcome.

41:37And it didn't work very well being done like that, as you can probably imagine. My colleagues tried something similar here in 2012, it turned out. I don't think it went very well either. It wasn't published. But we all ended up on the same team on the Upshot. And we did it for the first time in the 2014 midterm election, but without the infamous needle. But we published estimates for how we thought these races would go. And then obviously in 2016, the graphic that has become infamous was published for the first time. I believe the former Upshot editor, Kevin Qualley, is the father of that graphic, even if many of us claim some sort of, you know, role in the origin of the idea itself.

42:16In terms of how it works, it works a lot like how ordinary people look at elections. You have an expectation for how a county will go or a precinct will go based on how it's voted in the past. You see a result, you compare it to your expectation. And if the Democrats are doing better or worse than that expectation, then you need to start thinking that maybe the Democrats are going to do better than you thought. And when you get enough data, then the needle moves.

42:40Derek Thompson: moving back to the election of tuesday um there's some themes that i want to pull out and get your head on what can we say about which candidates did best like when you look at the over performers from tuesday is there a through line that you can see or is it more accurate to say that the through line is the absence of a through line, that different people did well in different circumstances, and it's hard to pull out some general rule of what worked where. I think there's no through line with an exception, I suppose, which is to say I don't think about this election mostly in terms of which candidates excelled, but the subset of candidates who did not.

43:24This was a wave in the classic sense. Everyone was swept away on the Republican side. It didn't matter whether a billion dollars was spent against you or if nothing was spent against you. It didn't matter whether you were an excellent campaigner or if you stayed home. If you were in a Trump plus 10 state or district, like it just didn't matter what you did unless there was a Democratic candidate who emerged out of a contested primary in a way that defined them as a candidate of the activist left.

43:50Derek Thompson: Then things were more complicated. But outside of those handful of exceptions, I don't really see any pattern here. I just see that the country decided that, you know what, we need to vote for a check on Donald Trump. And, yeah, I don't love this Democratic candidate because they said this woke thing in 2020, but I just can't vote for a Democrat this year. Rather, I just can't vote for Republican this year. And I think that in a different election, you would have seen more variation. But as it was, Democrats had to cross a certain line before they appeared to suffer a major electoral penalty. I'll also note, you know, in the category of exceptions, I do feel like for the third straight election that the Democrats are just not doing as well in some reliably Democratic states where the Democratic Party has had full control of government for a long time.

44:40And where there have been high profile cases, not necessarily of like, you know, extraordinary mismanagement or scandal, but where there's a sense that these states aren't governed as well as they should be. I think the Democrats got disappointing results once again in New York and Oregon, Minnesota. They're not disastrous results. It was a great night for Democrats. But compared to the national vote, I think that they just don't look as strong as one would have guessed six years ago, even if it's becoming less surprising by now.

45:10Derek Thompson: Before 2020, the most expensive Senate campaign in history cost about$200 million. That was, I believe, in Florida, like 2018. Elon Musk, one person, spent$200 million in Texas. And his candidate lost by 12 points to James Tallarico. In Texas. In, yeah, let me emphasize those two words again. In Texas. Is there a lesson here about the limits of money in politics? Certainly in this election. I mean, once again, I feel like there's a national revulsion against the Republican Party and the president. And in a different election, again, maybe that money could do the trick. But in this election, I think there are a lot of people who said, you know, James Tallarico may not be my cup of tea, but I don't really even feel like I have a choice necessarily.

45:59I think we saw this play out in different ways across the country. There are, you know, moderate Republicans and Republican-leaning voters who decided that they were going to vote for Tallarico despite the reservations. And on the other hand, there are Democratic-leaning voters who decided to vote for maybe flawed Democratic candidates despite their reservations. either way I just think the big picture here is the money could not stop this kind of tsunami even if you know maybe it could have stopped the normal wave right if you want to take this analogy too far like there's only the sandbags can hold up against some waves but not all of them and you know they spent 500 million dollars on sandbags that weren't designed for this particular that couldn't stop this particular wave

46:39Derek Thompson: I've said on this show that I'm wary of the fact that billionaires account for a larger and larger share of campaign spending in every cycle going back to 2016. But something about billionaire financing of campaigns I think is really important is that at a certain level of spending, the fact of that level of spending becomes a kind of advertisement against the spending, if you know what I mean. Like the fact that Elon Musk is spending$200 million on one race becomes its own artifact, its own own thing that can be used to motivate people to vote against the impression that billionaires think they can buy an election.

47:20Derek Thompson: And so it's not so much to say, oh, I'm not concerned about billionaire money in politics at all anymore. I hope people don't cut this. That's not what I'm representing. But I do think that money in politics is a complicated thing where, of course, money can buy attention. It can buy salience, especially in low salience elections. But also, if you spend past a certain amount, the fact of that spending becomes ammunition that the other side can use to say, do you want to be bought by one man? And so I think that that's another element that I'm just sort of kind of chewing on after Elon Musk blew hundreds of millions of dollars.

47:56Derek Thompson: I think it's an interesting theory. I think it's interesting theory. I don't have any evidence to back it up, to be honest with you. But I think that there are a couple of elements of it that I that do hold true to me. One is that these campaigns are definitely spending to the point of diminishing returns. And so, Texas, I'm actually not as sure whether that's true in Texas. That state is so big and so expensive that maybe you could have spent a couple hundred million dollars without just lighting it on fire. That's a genuine, I'm genuinely uncertain about that. But certainly in like Maine and Alaska, I mean, these states that have no major media market, just having tens of millions of dollars spent in them.

48:30It's like there's you can keep piling the money and I suppose the states are very important. But it's hard to believe that you're getting your dollars worth at that point. But once you're at diminishing returns, then I can easily imagine the case where, you know, any other stigma that comes with the political supporters you have could become more influential with voters. Maybe Elon Musk is that toxic. Or alternately, simply having that much support from a single powerful donor could rub voters the wrong way. I'm at least open to that.

49:03Derek Thompson: You mentioned that this was a good year for Democrats across the board, except for some Democrats who had the label of activists left on them. I want you to go into that a little bit more deeply because my read of this election was is is that the picture's nuanced. On the one hand, lots of self-described progressives won notable elections, but also lots of candidates like Tallarico and Ossoff won with enormous margins. And they seem to very cannily combine and appeal to several different factions. Like both Ossoff and Tallarico are claimed by parts of the populist, the economic populist left, who say they, like us, are focused on corruption and corporate power.

49:54Derek Thompson: But they often sometimes speak to sort of the sort of abundance pragmatist center left saying we want less regulation on housing. We want energy to be built, even if it isn't just just solar. And then they also, I think, are claimed by other moderates as well. And so I wonder how you think this election cashes out for the factions within the Democratic Party, despite the fact that in a wave year, sometimes it's hard to distinguish. because just everyone is winning everywhere. I think it's, I also think it's hard to distinguish between different progressive factions in any really rigorous way. I mean, progressive is a term that could apply to anyone from a socialist to Barack Obama or something, right?

50:39And it's not, I don't just, when I say a candidate of the progressive left, I don't just mean people who support Medicare for all. There are plenty of Democrats, a majority of congressional Democrats, I believe, support Medicare for all. I don't mean whether you support Israel or not. There are, I mean, again, I think about a majority of congressional Democrats voted against Aid for Israel. These are all actually at this point pretty mainstream ideas in the Democratic Party. They do not distinguish the group of candidates that I'm talking about. But there is a narrower group of progressive, not merely defined by their views on the issues, but defined by a degree of opposition to the mainstream of the Democratic Party that define themselves as a hero of the progressive left.

51:22That isn't camp. They may support Medicare for all. They may support any number of policy issues, but the idea is that they champion and they emphasize in their campaigns are the ones that are also those beloved by activists. They're not the sort of people who air advertisements talking about how we need to reduce drug costs or something. And I think that this difficult to define group of of candidates and in particular those that emerged from contested Democratic primaries over the summer fared worse in the general election. And who are you talking about here, for example? I mean, when I look, well, I think that the most obvious candidate in the Senate is Abdul El-Sayed.

52:01I think we could also mention that in Florida that Angie Nixon had a relatively underwhelming performance given the state's partisan lean. If you list out all of the seats from blue to red, Florida just is this red dot right in the middle where Democrats won a whole bunch of seats, more Republican than that. And that was by far the most Democratic seat that the Republicans managed to win. The only congressional district that I think the Democrats are going to lose in this election, other than the one that they lost due to other than the ones lost due to redistricting, of course, is the one that was held by Jared Golden in Maine's second congressional district, where the progressive candidate Matt Dunlap is probably going to lose when all the vote isn't counted.

52:43Will Lawrence in Michigan 7th kind of barely won a district that's highly competitive in a normal election that you would have expected to maybe be a double digit win in this kind of way. Stepping back, I just think that when you look at the candidates that fared worse in this election, they're almost all in this category. And I should be clear, by the way, about something that I don't think I've always been clear about, which is that there are candidates who are of the progressive left who did fare fine. So I'm not saying that every one of them got punished. But when you find the examples of Democrats who underperformed, they are kind of all in this bucket.

53:16Right.

53:17Derek Thompson: Is it fair to say, because I want to make sure that this point is well heard, that while there are clearly progressives that did quite well on Tuesday, it's hard to find someone who's a self-described member of the left who overperformed the median Democrat. is competitive with one caveat, which is that, you know, in non-competitive districts, there are plenty of cases where self-identified progressive Democratic Socialist Justice Democrat types, particularly incumbents, fared like any other Democrat. In these competitive races, though, which is where the voters find out who the candidates are, where there were contested primaries over the summer to, you know, deepen the cleavages within the party and where you know ultimately the money was also spent by republicans to take a shot at defining these democratic candidates in the general election there i think there it's it's it's not exactly universal but almost all of the cases where the democrats had disappointing performances last night with respect to the national vote or almost all come out of candidates who had a contested primary over the summer in a battleground district or state that's interesting i want to finish on just looking to the near future.

54:34Derek Thompson: I mean, the fact that Tuesday's outcome is nearly unprecedented is gonna make it hard to identify historical precedents that we can say, ah, okay, now we know exactly how this is gonna go in the next two years. But thinking about what midterms this reminds you of or what periods in American history this moment reminds you of, where do we think we are? What is this? Is this like 2006? Is this like some other decade that represented a swing from one party to the other? Or do you think we're just in terra incognita here? Well, let me give you a couple of examples that I think you can take in different ways.

55:12I think that 2006 is in many ways a natural comparison. George W. Bush won re-election in a divided country by a modest margin that was trumpeted as a realignment. He then proceeded to, you know, he simply focused on immigration reform and social security that divided his base and didn't fulfill his core campaign promises while the war in Iraq dragged on, gas prices rose, and so on. And we know how that story ends two years later. It ends in an enormous Democratic victory. With the housing crisis as well. With the housing crisis as well. And stepping back for a second, almost as important in answering this question to almost as important as the midterm result in thinking about this question is the president's approval rating.

55:57It would be one thing if the Republicans were getting clobbered last night with the president's approval at 45%, like, say, Barack Obama in 2010. But the president's approval rating is in the mid-30s. And there's basically no precedent. I would say there is no precedent in the era of modern polling for a president to have this kind of approval rating, you know, in the middle of a second term and come back to being sufficiently popular for his party to reclaim the White House two years later. I just don't think there's any example of that. It's also worth noting that But there's something else in common, I think, with the 2008, the 2006 and 2008 election, which is the extent that the Democrats sort of had a challenge in trying to find like what their message was to to voters at a time when people were pretty dissatisfied with the state of the country.

56:49They had a variety of competitive presidential candidates who ultimately crafted an optimistic message that hope and change that it was enough for Barack Obama to win in 2008. But there's a lot that feels similar to me. I think the 1974 election is an interesting counterpoint, though. Now, there's a big difference there in that Richard Nixon was impeached, and it was Gerald Ford who ran in 1976. He still lost, but he only lost by two points. We don't look back on the 1974 and 1976 election as the dawn of an era of sustained Democratic strength. Instead, we actually look at it as kind of a fake out.

57:32I believe— The end of an era, I would say. Yeah, it is. You know, I think some people at the time—I'm struggling to remember the name of the person— said that the 1980 election, the Reagan landslide, was 1976 deferred. that the Republicans actually did accomplish this big realignment and succeeded in developing a new political coalition in the wake of the Civil Rights Act, Vietnam, the counterculture and so on. The New Deal coalition really was broken. But Richard Nixon was so discredited that the Democrats were going to actually win this 1976 election. And it was just going to be one more term before the Republicans finally got to show that they had succeeded in this realigning election.

58:17I don't think that 1976 is a perfect analogy because the president's failures are not just about ethics, corruption and personal. I think that there are meaningful ways in which like the political foundation of populism has been shaken. The president's, you know, the president's tariffs, for instance, are a policy that people now connect to high prices. His war on Iran is connected to the perception of high prices. His immigration policies have led to a change in public opinion about immigration. And so there are ways in which like the political foundation for Trump's brand of conservative populism has gotten worse.

58:55I don't also think it's the macroeconomic foundation of it has gotten worse. You know, we're now in an era of, you know, high inflation and low unemployment and i just don't know that um this uh that this kind of policy is going to continue to sustain um like the kind of elite backing that that were elite support that's often necessary for um political coalitions to sustain themselves you know as like the debt becomes a bigger issue in the years ahead so i i think that there are a lot of ways in which the ground is is much shakier for republicans than 1974 or 1976 but there is something about that 1974-1976 analogy that I think is pretty good, and that's what the Democratic coalition in 1974 and 1976 really had been broken by the 1960s.

59:38In hindsight, the New Deal coalition was gone. And I do think that it's possible that we'll look back in 10 years and say, you know, the Obama coalition actually is already gone. Yeah, they couldn't put it back together right now because of extraordinary dissatisfaction with Donald Trump, But I'm not sure that people believe that the, you know, the constellation of policies and messages advanced by Democrats in 2006 or 2008 all the way up until 2020 are perceived as offering a clear solution to the problems facing the country today and maybe even are perceived as being part of the problem in some cases.

1:00:13And so I think that's the downside risk to Democrats, that there actually is lasting damage to their coalition that's been done by the failures of the Democratic Party between 2008 and 2024, that they need a bigger reimagination and a new set of answers to the problems facing the country in order to kind of capitalize on the opportunity they have. And in the 1970s, Democrats were unable to do that. I should make sure I understand the latter point.

1:00:35Derek Thompson: In a way, wasn't 2026 the revenge of the Obama coalition? It was young people and Hispanics and blacks in the working class, right, who moved back into the Democratic Party. And so in a way, this was the Obama coalition reconstituting itself at least for one midterm, right? It's almost the Trump coalition that was the head fake revealed by Tuesday's result. Well, yes, but in the 1976 analogy, the zombie New Deal coalition that came back in 1974 and 1976, in hindsight, was not a lasting one. It was one that was propelled by the public's revulsion at Watergate. And if what we actually have in this, I think it's at least worth in our scenarios here to talk about the worst case for Democrats for a moment, which I don't think is by any means inevitable, to be clear.

1:01:24The worst case for Democrats here is that this is a zombie Obama coalition that has been that has been reanimated by the president, much as the New Deal coalition was briefly reanimated by Richard Nixon and Watergate, but actually is not sustainable still. and that the contradictions and tensions within it and the changes in, you know, American politics and culture since 2008 just don't sustain this thing unless the Democrats have a reimagined answer to what faces the problem today.

1:01:52Derek Thompson: Yeah. Which they didn't in the 70s. I mean, my read, which is absolutely emerging from your analysis, is that the middle of this country, that swing vote area of young people and working class, multiracial Americans is so liquid right now that it's very hard to say what either coalition looks like going forward, Republicans or Democrats. So many certainties that we had just 24 months ago were exploded on Tuesday. And so what I think is really interesting about politics at the moment, there is no clear leader of the Democratic Party. I mean, it's not Chuck Schumer. He's not going to run for president in 2028.

1:02:37Derek Thompson: Is it Ossoff? Is it Tallarico? Is it El-Sayed? Is it AOC? Will she even run? It's very, very hard to say who's the top of that list. I didn't even mention Kamala and Gavin, even though they're at the top of the prediction markets. And then the Republican side, I mean, J.D. Vance just torched Trumpism in a tweet on Tuesday. Although arguably he was keeping with Trumpism. I wonder how you, in this moment of really, really high uncertainty, I wonder how you're seeing the identity of these parties develop. If I may mix and match my analogies for a moment, I think that one thing that's really interesting right now is that both parties are discredited.

1:03:14That's something that was true for one party in 2006. The Republicans were discredited by a comprehensive failure during the Bush years. It was also in hindsight true of both parties in 1974, where the Republicans had been discredited by Watergate and the Democrats had still been discredited by their failures in the 60s. when both parties are discredited, there's an opening for both of them. One side at the end of this is going to come up with a reimagined message that explains why they offer a solution to the problems that now face the country and why after 25 years of being dissatisfied with things, we might end up somewhere better.

1:03:50I think that oddly enough, Donald Trump in 2016 and the Republicans in 2012 are interesting to keep in mind here when we think about the headless Democratic Party right now. The Republican Party was discredited by the Bush years. In hindsight, the three-legged stool of Ronald Reagan's coalition had been destroyed by the financial crisis, the Iraq war and the rise of the millennial generation and its progressive views on cultural issues. The Democrats weren't exactly discredited in 2010, but like I think it's fair to say that they had an opening to win the 2012 election with the recession still happening and with Obama, with people often disappointed in Barack Obama's performance, even if nothing like what the Republicans are dealing with today.

1:04:32But the Republicans didn't come up with something new. They didn't have a leader either. And they had a variety of candidates who basically tried to reignite different sparks of what was left of the Reagan coalition. And it didn't work because it had been discredited. And it honestly didn't offer credible solutions to the country anymore. Like, you couldn't argue back in 2012 with a straight face that all we needed to solve the nation's problems was another round of tax cuts, a new round of military interventions, and more Christian social policies. And the Democrats are at least at risk of having a similar problem like that if they were to have like a Gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris, who sounds exactly like, you know, the same Democratic politicians of the last two decades who may be discredited in the minds of voters as well.

1:05:12And what it ultimately took for Republicans to break out of this was someone who came up with a new set of arguments that were about what was wrong with the country today. Donald Trump was like, you know what's actually wrong is trade, that we have dismantled our domestic manufacturing, its immigration. You know, the list of things that define Trumpism that were different from the previous Republican Party. You could say something similar, by the way, about Reagan did in the 80s. He wasn't just the old in the 70s. He wasn't just the old Republican Party of Taft or something or Eisenhower revitalized.

1:05:41His policies and his messes were grounded in the dysfunction of the 1970s and inflation and so on. I think that's the sort of thing that has to happen when you have two discredited parties and a new set of problems facing the country that no one believes that either party is really built to address. And we'll just see whether there's any Democrat or any Republican, for that matter, though they have an enormous disadvantage in coming up with one before 2028, to be frank. Whether any Democrat can come up with something to offer a cogent explanation of what's wrong with the country and why they can fix it.

1:06:11That's the task. I don't know who it is. anyone who does it is the Democratic nominee for president, basically.

1:06:16Derek Thompson: Right. I think it's a really powerful frame, like this idea that 2028 is our first election in decades that represents a head to head contest between two headless parties. And it's a really, really compelling and discredited, which I think is unique. They can't just run back the old playbook and expect that people will take it seriously. No, we have so many to run against the establishment, I think, will be critical in order to gain popularity. So this is a tough one. And it's going to take, you know, political it's going to take someone who's pretty entrepreneurial to capitalize on it. I don't know that I see anybody in either party who's going to do it.

1:06:47But in theory, when you have, when this many voters are up for grabs, there's an opening. If you really want to have a spicy take, I should also note it may be an opening for someone who's not a conventional politician, much like Donald Trump, or, you know, I think this is unlikely to actually succeed, but I think we also have to toss out the idea that under some circumstances an independent candidate can be a factor in the election on these kind of circumstances.

1:07:13Derek Thompson: That's a whole other episode. I got in trouble from some political scientists, but I tweeted that chart that just shows the decline of people who self-identify as Democrats and Republicans and the incredible rise in people who self-identify as political independents. And I said, I don't need a lecture on how difficult it is for political dependents to win a presidential contest. I get that it is, that's the 100-year flood in presidential election history. But if and when an independent wins the presidency at some point in the next 100, 200 years, someone's going to pull up a chart like this and say, this is the most obvious development in American history.

1:07:55Derek Thompson: that the rise of self-identified independence made the election of a political independent relatively inevitable. I completely agree. I mean, I think that if an independent candidate succeeded, everyone would say we should have seen it coming in hindsight. I wrote a stupid piece, and it sort of had to be stupid in order to publish this argument, like last year, where I said, you know, at this point, it's a little bit like getting two pandas in a room. Like, if there are two pandas in a room and, like, one gets pregnant, like, I mean you can't say that you should that it was impossible or something right at this point but like obviously this is probably not going to happen like it's really hard to get pandas to breed apparently it's like the only thing I know about pandas uh at this point when you have two parties that's accredited like the pandas are in a room I mean I don't know whether it's going to happen it probably isn't but like are you really going to tell me that you're that we're going to be stunned in two years if an if AOC and JD Vance are the nominees that an independent candidate is viable?

1:08:53Is someone really going to say that that's, no one could have seen that coming?

1:08:58Derek Thompson: I would say, especially at a time of extraordinary wealth in this country, it is easier maybe for some people to either self-finance or be financed by one particular benefactor. I agree. I am not in any way predicting a third-party vector in 2028. No, absolutely not. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. We're in a two panda moment is what I take to be the conclusion. Nate Cohn, thank you very, very much. Derek, thanks for having me.