What Is Haley Stevens Doing?

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1:08This whole midterm season, our show has been committed to bringing you weekly conversations that put the elections in perspective. But now that the big day is finally here, I think a whole lot of us can relate to how G. Elliott Morris is feeling. Exhausted, but also I'm on my third cup of coffee, like fifth handful of Halloween candy. I am, I am ready to go. You got to do what you got to do in the last couple of days, you know.

1:37Elliott writes about polls on his sub stack, Strength in Numbers. And right from the start, he's been bullish on the Dems' chances to regain power. These days, the polls are telling him Democrats have a 70 % chance of taking the Senate. I feel like you've just been like, you've been someone who's not afraid to call it like you see it. Yeah, I mean, other people are like finally coming around to this point of view. But it's not like the Halloween candy just boiled my brain. This was pretty easy. Frankly, this was all pretty easy to see coming. Typically, the party out of power gains in the final weeks before the midterm.

2:17Like, Donald Trump has a 35 % approval rating. I think it was proper to be booster-ish, to be optimistic, bullish early on. Also around the table this week, my friend Alan Elrod. Alan, you're a columnist at Liberal Currents. You've been thinking about congressional districts in the South a lot, too. How are the vibes for you at this moment? I'm glad to know I'm here also on, I guess, the Hopium train. It's nice to know that these two are feeling positive. But that said, over the weekend, Democrats got a true post-Halloween jump scare in their key Michigan Senate race, where Abdul El-Sayed had to once again do battle with the candidate he defeated back in the primary, Democratic Congresswoman Haley Stevens.

3:05This all started with some vague allegations of discomfort on Stevens' part. Then El-Sayed uninvited her to a Sunday campaign event. Finally, Stevens rescinded her endorsement, said she planned to vote for the Republican, Mike Rogers. And then she turned up on cable news, where she explained herself poorly. Do you want Democrats to win the control of the Senate? I absolutely do. i just i'm just casting my vote this one way michigan there's a lot of people out there voting i but with all due respect you're casting your vote that way and you're on television right now talking about it and you had a press conference earlier so you're not just casting your vote you are very publicly casting your vote which is fine but that's what you're doing right um look anderson i am you know happy okay that pause says a lot first of all that is the blinking if she is a democrat which i think we can say if at this point right the state party has disavowed her she's voting for publicly voting for republican for senate let's just grant her her own words to anderson cooper that she's a democrat and she wants Democrats to win.

4:24You could just be quiet and not and like not vote for the guy. Yeah, not saying anything was an option. You don't have to become a Republican. Yeah, you don't have to endorse the guy. It seems pretty clear that this is at least in large part, if not entirely about her kind of own personal issues with Abdul Sayed. And all the indicators we have is that Stevens was telling people in the party up until, you know, Saturday, middle of the night that she was not going to endorse Rogers and her own staff were waiting, right, for her at the event with Clyburn. So I think that, you know, whatever else people want to try to put on this in terms of it being about anything about larger Democratic Party issues, I don't really think it is.

5:10I think it's a personal issue with Haley Stevens. But I do want to say something that I think is important and that other people have said, but has to be said again, which is she explicitly said that she was voting for Mike Rogers to oppose hate. And I think we need to be as clear as possible that the Mike Rogers campaign has run one of the most bigoted campaigns we've seen in the last 50 years of American politics. I mean, he has come out and said horrible Islamophobic things about Abdul El-Sayed. We have to just call it what it is. Yeah. I mean, I guess the big question after all this, though, is how will it influence the actual election in Michigan?

5:49And I wonder, Elliot, do you have opinions on that based on what you're seeing about early voting or anything else? Yeah, so probably somewhere around 45-50 % of ballots have already been cast in Michigan. So that cake is already baked in terms of those votes. It's a close state. So maybe this makes up the difference. But I'll just note in the new New York Times-Siena University poll that came out last night as of recording. Abdul El-Sayed's winning by 11 percentage points over Mike Rogers, and he's winning 96, either 92 or 96, numbers are fuzzy in my head right now, percent of the black vote.

6:27So this is probably not the thing that breaks his campaign. It's a close race, though, so if he loses, people will say she's the deciding factor, but anything could have been the deciding factor. The polls could have just been off the whole time, right? Yeah. In Slate's news and politics chat, someone made the observation like, let no rake go unstepped. And I just feel like that is what something like this feeds into for people who are hoping the Democrats pull something out here. There's just this sense of PTSD about an election like this one. And Elliot, you sent something out on social media today that I thought kind of captured.

7:13Oh, you guys read my tweets. People do be reading my tweets that I didn't know how to expect. But like you basically were like, you're like, yeah, like the most realistic option is Democrats are going to retake the Senate and retake the House. But also like, it's just statistics. We're flipping coins here at this point. And like it could go either way. And frankly, we know there's error baked in. And I do feel like that's like a message to convey, like the polls are going to be wrong in one way or another, probably, just because they're not perfect instruments, right? Yeah, it's very well put.

7:46I mean, if the polls are as off as they were in 2020, Democrats will win 50 seats, they'll be one seat shy. Just remember, what was Hillary Clinton's probability of winning the 2016 election? We were all there. We all witnessed the polling error. It was around 70, maybe 75%. So the polls are - And we all know what happened next. Right. And we have Donald Trump as president now as proof of what can happen when the polls are a little bit off. So it's not unreasonable to put yourself in the shoes of someone who's waking up on November 4th and Republicans have held the Senate, but still, it would be a sort of earth-shattering miss by the pollsters and the pundits if the Democrats don't win the House, however.

8:32Well, every day I wake up and I choose what world I want to live in, the one where there's pulling air in the Republican direction or the Democratic direction. Yeah. Today I'm choosing they'll be exactly perfect, probably, but maybe not. Be comfortable being uncomfortable. I feel like that's our message here. Embrace uncertainty. It's like the new Survivor season. Today on the show, it's election day. Let's hang out. One more thing. It's going to be a wild 24 hours. We're going to be up late, and we're even having a live event at noon Eastern time on Wednesday to process the midterm results. So grab a snack, join us.

9:07You can reserve your seat at the lunch table by going on over to slate.com slash surge live. All right, I'm Mary Harris. You're listening to What Next. Stick around.

9:46Transcription by CastingWords a nonpartisan look at the stories that matter most to investors, including policy initiatives for retirement savings, taxes and trade, inflation concerns, the Federal Reserve, and how regulatory developments can affect companies, sectors, and even the entire market. Mike and his guests offer their perspective on how policy changes could affect what you do with your portfolio. Download the latest episode and follow at schwab.com slash WashingtonWise, or wherever you listen. This episode is brought to you by FreshBooks. If you are building a service business, the money side might feel like a whole second job, especially when you want every invoice to show clients you're the real deal, not just a side hustle.

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12:18Before we move on from Michigan, I just want to go back there one more time because I do feel like what's happening there, the reason why it's taken off in so many people's imaginations, the reason we keep coming back to it, is that it really is like a nightmare microcosm of a couple of narratives that are haunting Dems, not just now, but I think will continue to haunt Dems. into the future. Like there's the idea of moderates versus progressives, right? Abdul al-Sayed, notably progressive, endorsed by Bernie Sanders, running in a swing state and, you know, running this like can a progressive win there.

12:53Haley Stevens, who just had this crash out on Anderson Cooper, moderate. So there's that. There's the idea of Israel kind of versus everyone and how the Democrats are going to deal with Israel moving forward. And then there's just like the cracks in the Democratic coalition more broadly and how they will be managed emotionally by leadership. So I guess looking at those three metrics, and I'll start with you, Alan, what do you see in this race? And is it making you feel better about where things are headed or not? I mean, I think I did a little post last night where I said the Democrats are in a ray.

13:30Interesting. Elisa Botkin is on the right page. Everyone is on the page. In fact, in some ways. Chuck Schumer called out Islamophobia, right, last night? Exactly. So it's like, hmm. In some ways, the party has been incredibly unified in the last 48 hours. I mean, what we've seen is Democrats from across the sort of moderate to progressive spectrum rally around El-Sayed and make, I think, very clear that, okay, sure, maybe I said something last month or a few weeks ago about this statement here or my position on Hassan Piker. But the party understands there's only one way out of this. There's only one way out of the sort of authoritarian crisis we're in.

14:10There's only one way out of the economic spiral we're in. There's only one way out of this illegal war with Iran. And it's Democratic politicians taking power, period. And so I think the party is on board in a lot of ways. That's what I see is a lot of people just are saying the stakes are so much higher than whatever Haley Stevens personal beef is with Hassan Piker. And I've been actually pretty encouraged by how many top level Democrats just get that. Elliot, are you on board with this? Yeah, I mean, it seems like if Haley Stevens really wanted Abdul El-Sayed to lose this election, then she's just handed him a gift in giving all the Democrats in Michigan and federally something to rally behind him with.

14:58A highly public news event in which they can all say, I disavow that. I love Abdul El-Sayed. please vote for him over election denier Mike Rogers. That's exactly what they've done. So in a sense, all she's done is validate the progressive complaints, fears of centrist modernists in the Democratic Party who say these people are Republican light. They will embrace Trump instead of handing power to progressives like AES and shot herself in the foot in terms of her credibility and future electoral prospects. I love how you've already embraced the AES like he's the AOC. oh it's easier to say i mean look it's not an ideological thing it's just so much easier people call me jim gm it's easier right i'm gonna call you mh meh meh it's not great um so it's interesting you brought up to um hailey stevens and like bad vibes and whether she is like filled with bad vibes it's interesting to me to look at michigan because there was a third candidate in the primary who was mallory mcmorrow and it's interesting to me to see the difference and how Haley Stevens is behaving in this moment, and Mallory McMorrow, who similarly was sort of tagged as being a moderate, got out of the race for Abdul El-Sayed, notably after a fake poll came out, Elliot, which I believe you reported on, that she says tanked her campaign.

16:20Well, you know, she says it tanked her campaign. We can, like, maybe... She says that donors pulled out after this poll. Right. I think we can maybe take her out of word. We don't have the donor, you know, call off transcripts. There were a lot of other surveys before this one came out showing her losing ground. She was in a tough spot as someone who was not as progressive as a progressive candidate and not as sort of moderately sort of openly centrist and also anti-progressive as the modern, the centrist in the campaign. So that's just like a hard place to be. Yeah, she was like, yeah. But the difference is in their behavior, she wants a future in the Democratic Party and Haley Stevens doesn't.

16:53Yes. Yeah. Okay, let's talk about a different race where there was some rake stepping last week because we didn't really have a chance to dig into it on the show, which is Alaska. There was this New York Times reporting that Democratic strategists were involved in getting a second Dan Sullivan on the ballot there. Of course, Alaska is a place where Mary Peltola is running for Senate, and there's a great hope that we will have a Democratic senator from the state of Alaska. I guess I'm a little curious. Well, I'll start with you, Alan. Can we believe Mary Paltola, who right now is saying, I didn't know anything about this, even though it seems very clear from the New York Times reporting that people affiliated with her campaign did know that the fake Dan Sullivan was being put on the ballot?

17:46No, I mean, it seems like this was a scheme. But it doesn't matter. Like, I don't like it i don't think that it's like shaking his head he's like nope nope yeah schemes happen schemes happen all the time the republicans have done shady stuff before and also like you know if you don't know which dan sullivan to vote for in alaska you can just rank them first and second and your vote will count for the you know for the real real dan sullivan right and we should say donald trump keeps saying that he wants to try to take peltola off the ballot and put her in jail I think that's a bigger story than to Dan Sullivan.

18:21I mean, Republicans recruited a literal inmate to run in this race or the governor's race as well. They did the same exact thing. So sorry, Alan. Yes, I think that that's worth pointing out. Elliot has strong feelings here. No, I agree. It's just I think that I don't think it's not a story. I'm just baffled by the degree of coverage it's getting, especially compared to the president's attempt to use it as a way to just straight up throw out an election and then say he's going to jail another Democrat. Was there any evidence that voters care? I mean, clearly you guys are like, whatever. But in terms of voters in Alaska, do they feel like, maybe you have this data, Elliot, like, like, do they feel like they're being misled in some way and want to take it out at the ballot box?

19:03I haven't seen any polling to suggest that voters care about this particular instance. But what voters do care about right now is like corruption, the general feeling that politicians are looking out for themselves. So I could definitely see this being the - Feeding into that narrative. Yeah, feeding into that narrative and hurting her campaign with people who are already, right, I mean, to win in Alaska, you got to win some Trump voters. So Mary Paltola, if she was on a path to victory, just hypothetically, she had brought some of those Trump voters into her coalition, maybe they were still hesitant.

19:35This might give them a reason to think, Mary Paltola is just looking out for herself, or this is shady politics going on. I don't know, of like hypothetically that could matter. If Democrats lose Michigan or Alaska, are there hopes of nabbing the Senate over? Either of you. We have this question. If Democrats lose Alaska, what's their chance of winning the Senate? Right now, their chance of winning the Senate, 77%. If they lose Alaska, it's about 50-50. So that could be definitely be the deciding seat. Oh, interesting. It really does have an impact. I think that this matters in the capital M sense and like democracy, right?

20:12Like rigging the state electoral system to take maybe one or two points against your opponent in a state where one or two points could really matter is like dirty politics. But at the end of the day, the story probably has a bigger impact than this would have had on the ballots because Alaskans can rank their choices. So it was really a non-issue from the start. But also it could have the opposite effect, right? If Donald Trump's using this to say any Democratic victory in Alaska is illegitimate, that might equally rile up Democrats and have a sort of reverse effect. Okay, one more race that I think is worth talking to both of you about is Texas.

20:51Because there hasn't been any Democratic rake stepping here. Like James Tallarico seems like a legitimately strong candidate who is making a good case to voters in this moment. But you know, I was reading the New York Times this weekend, and folks close to James Tallarico were basically saying their internal polls have the races pretty tight there, even though Democrats are very, very excited about it and think they're gonna win. Like Chuck Schumer was calling journalists last week to tell them this. But they're like, it's a coin flip. It is a coin flip. We just don't know. Elliot, I know you have been digging into like who is voting early, what that is telling you.

21:27What does it tell you in this moment? Yeah, so the turnout, the early voting data in Texas indicates three groups are really turning out to vote at a higher rate than in past midterm elections. Latinos, who might, you know, in the most Latino heavy precincts in Harris County in Houston, where we have really good early voting data, like at the person individual level, Latinos are increasing their turnout by, you know, maybe double. Young People is the second group. They're voting in a way that they haven't voted since 2018. And like a big reason Democrats won in 2018 is because they got presidential level turnout among some of these groups or nearly presidential level, just high turnout among their really hardcore base of supporters who tended to drop off.

22:11And then the third group is just Democrats in general, people who vote in the primary in Texas who voted for James Tallarico. He brought in a whole bunch of new voters. These voters are more Democratic than they have ever been in Texas. I think the new voters in Texas are about 80-20 Democrat versus Republican. That's the biggest gap that I've ever seen in the early voting data there. Alan, what are you thinking about this race in Texas and what we know about it and what we don't? Well, so my wife is from Fort Worth, which is Tarrant County, the Texas county that gave us Beau French. And I'm thinking about it all the time.

22:52When I talk to her relatives there, because a lot of her family is in Texas, I mean, this is a vibes based assessment, right? But the energy is really, really with Democrats. There's a lot of outrage. There's a lot of people who are not as typically politically plugged in who are very frustrated. I think that the Texas Republican Party actually wrote a thing about this at the occurrence earlier this year, which argued that the Texas Republican Party is kind of the future of the Republican Party. when you look at the types of candidates and the nature of the party. It's highly authoritarian. It's really corrupt.

23:26And what you're seeing is, yes, the dangers of that, but also the electoral consequences, right? Ken Paxton is a disaster. And I think that that's going to cost them not just potentially this Senate seat against Tellurico, but it's going to hurt them down ballot. Greg Abbott has been in power for a very long time. There's a lot that people can complain about now at this point when it comes to Greg Abbott, his conduct in office. So, you know, the Texas Republican Party in some ways is is reaping now, I think, some of the consequences of decades of, you know, stranglehold on politics, but also a dissent into really far right Trumpian corrupt politics.

24:09And what it gets them is bad candidates and a really fed up electorate.

24:19We're going to take a quick break. Quick reminder before we go to commercial, the next 24 hours, they're going to be a lot. So hang out with us and process how this story ends. We're having a live event Wednesday, noon Eastern time, and you can join us. Just click the link in our show notes.

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27:04Elliot, as our poll man, I want to turn to you because I feel like - I love it. Poll man. Part of the reason I feel like people are wigging out in this moment is that the polls are all saying the same thing. And it also seems like the people processing the polls don't know what to do with this information that's all pointing in one direction. It seems to make them nervous. Like there was a Washington Post article that they just wrote about a poll they did in Kansas because it was so good for the Democrat. They were basically like, we have a really good poll for Adam Hamilton. We're going to write about why we have a good poll for Adam Hamilton versus like just being like, wow, good poll for Adam Hamilton.

27:43And to me, that kind of like meta analysis speaks to the nervousness on all sides. I don't know if you want to talk about that article and what that poll found as a kind of microcosm of the spooky scaries for people looking at the polls right now. Yeah, I think, you know, we could like, you can make a predictive model of how democratic or republican people are by how much they freak out about about the polls that's true the republicans are like it's gonna be fine like the polls are wrong the polls are all wrong and the democrats are like oh my god all the surveys are showing we're doing well they're all they must all be hopelessly effed up so in this case the like you know washington post poll reporter uh i guess in like nate cohen would be extreme closet democrats that's for legal reasons this is a joke Yeah, I mean, all Democrats have PTSD, post-traumatic survey disorder in this case, and they're just worried about the polls being wrong again.

28:34One part of that is because polls get adjusted, right? It's not like you just do a survey and then you're like, here, 80 % of these people said this and 20 % said this. You then go into your crosstabs and you're like, well, let's correct for how many Republicans we have and how many college-educated people we have. So there's an element of art to this. Yeah, polling is scientific, but it's a very artful science, the pollster in me would say in response to you. I mean, look, if you're doing a poll of Kansas, let's take the Washington Post-Kansas poll as an example, and you want 1 ,000 people and you're doing this over the phone, you're going to have to call or text 100, maybe 150 ,000 people because the response rate in the survey is less than a percent.

29:15150 times more people than you actually want to respond, you have to call. look the types of people who are going to answer that phone call are going to be statistically weird they're just not going to be representative of the public odds are right yes so they're older if it's a phone call if it's a text message actually sometimes they can be younger if it's over the internet they can tend to be younger they do tend to be wider and more educated and higher income these are all things that predict voting for democrats so when the washington post says hey our poll is really good for the democrats one of the things they're pointing out is that even though they have tried to get the right number of Democrats, they're concerned that the type of Democrats they're getting in their survey are more likely to vote and more likely to vote for Democrats, less likely to be conservative Democrats, more progressive Democrats might be a very simplified way of putting this.

30:06And so they're saying, hey, based on these response patterns we're seeing in our polls, we think there's extra uncertainty. I think this is a really responsible thing to do. But also now I'll just like put on my media criticism hat for the final part of this monologue is like no one wants to be wrong again. This would be the fourth cycle in the past five cycles where six cycles where the polls overestimated the Democrats significantly. If that comes to pass, the polling industry has suffered massive credibility hit from these elections where, you know, they're not that wrong. They're only overestimating support for Democrats by one percentage point in terms of vote share, two percentage points on margin.

30:47And the pollsters like to say, hey, we have this magical tool that can tell you, this practically magical tool that can tell you what Americans think on any topic, what's important to them, what they want Congress to focus on. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. But the only thing, like the main way that people consume the polls and know what polls exist is with the election forecasting context. So they're all really nervous for those reasons. I think it's legit. But then for the consumer of polls, it's also very confusing. It really is. I mean, the bigger issue is that the vote is close.

31:15And so it's like, if you're off by 3%, that could make a difference. It's like a win or lose. And like, that's a margin of error. I'd like to add a little hopium. Yes, please. Which is here, here. Let's say that they're off a little bit just in the direction, two or three points, whatever. I want to talk about some of the places where we're in that margin and they're not they're insane i mean we're talking about like south carolina the louisiana senate race my home district here in central arkansas is a four-point race uh you know the tennessee ninth which republicans in tennessee gerrymandered memphis into oblivion to try to take that seat is now a tight race some of its candidate quality some of it's the bad in the general environment but if you add up what could be right it doesn't have to be but let's if we're on the top end, if we were in an actually like D10 or D plus 11 environment, and then you add a little bit of candidate quality issues on there, and then maybe the polls are actually missing some Democrats.

32:10You know, I don't want to tell people prepare for the greatest night of your life. That feels deeply irresponsible. But like, there is a world where that little miss on top of that environment and, you know, the ways that candidate quality also affects things means we see some pretty impressive flips. And we also see some pretty impressive near misses. Yeah. I mean, Alan, you've been checking in like all over the country for this Better Know a District series for Liberal Currents, where you're talking about these small congressional districts where you're like, listen, things are changing here.

32:42Do you want to talk about a couple of them and just explain like why you selected them and what they're telling you? Absolutely. So one idea is my home district, Arkansas second, that includes the Little Rock metropolitan area. And Republicans here did gerrymandered a little, they cut out chunks of Little Rock and put it in some other districts because Little Rock's a very black city. But it's a district where the Republican here is pretty bland. His name is French Hill. He doesn't run on a super MAGA kind of ticket or anything like that. He doesn't talk up being like super Trumpy, but he basically votes with Trump all the time.

33:17And so what Democrats have realized is they have a huge opportunity here because there's a lot of frustration. There's a lot of anger. Arkansas is an agricultural state. There's a lot of farming. You get outside of Little Rock and it gets farmlandy pretty fast. So there's a lot of people who might actually in the rural parts of this district stay home because they're getting crushed on gas prices and on tariffs. Was French Hill ready for like a real fight here? No, I don't think French Hill knows how to have a fight. French Hill's whole thing is that he just is like the most like amiable he's a gentleman congressman yes i just love french hill doesn't know how to have a fight i mean just like you get him in a bar fight he's useless yeah french hill french hill is a banker from an area of you know his friends all live in the kind of west little rock and heights areas of little rock and it's just a very he's a very sort of tony button down kind of guy and um now he suddenly has to fight for his life because people are mad.

34:20You know, Hallie Schaffner is, I don't think she's going to flip the state, but she's in striking distance of Tom Cotton. And that is crazy. The Tennessee ninth, Justin Pearson is a remarkable candidate, right? He's one of the Tennessee three who were kicked out of the Tennessee legislature over their gun control protest. Yeah, we had him on the show. He's a fantastic communicator, but his district has been made into a district that includes like the spiritual home of the KKK and he's a young black man. So it's just it's it's they've given him a hard job here. And yet the rage is real. And I think this is another thing.

34:55Southern progressives, but especially black southerners are really mad. Yeah, they're really mad. The Calais decision and the way Republicans have behaved in the wake of the Calais decision has created a huge amount of rage across the South. Are we seeing that in Black turnout, Elliot? Yeah, at least in North Carolina, Black voters are making up about one to two percentage points, a higher share of the electorate than they did in 2022. So there's some evidence of higher turnout among the group. Yeah. I mean, this point was made online by Jamel Bowie. But if you're in the South, we're not that far removed from the pre-voting rights, pre-civil rights era.

35:37There are people whose grandparents are alive who remember it. There are people who were kids when those reforms weren't in place. There are a lot of very live memories around here about what it looked like when America was genuinely not a fully fledged liberal democracy, when Black people were just disenfranchised across the region. And the palpable sense that people are trying to take us back there is very, very present across the region. One thing, Elliot, you've said, and you'll correct me if I misheard you here, but you basically said that if polls are going to be wrong this election, they're often wrong in one direction, which to me is a useful thing to know because the country is large.

36:21Tuesday night, we're going to be seeing some things that come in like early. And then we're going to be seeing Alaska and California, which are like, you know, you got rank choice voting, you got people mailing things in, it's going to take a while, blah, blah, blah. Exactly. But like, then it's like, okay, well, we have like, South Carolina, Maine, North Carolina, New Hampshire, you know, we have we have these things that are on the East Coast that maybe we're going to know something about. How does this data, I guess, for both of you, how does this factor in your into your plan for Tuesday night, and how you're going to be thinking about the results and when you think you're going to know what.

36:54Yeah, these are like debate rules, right? So I'll go first. The way to follow the election night, I think, is compare the results against the polls in those places, in places that are reporting early. This tends to forecast how well the polls will do in other states, at least once you have a critical mass four, five, six states reporting or like a bunch of counties within those states. So the way that I'll be watching the results is in quick counting early reporting places, Virginia, Florida, also Kentucky and Indiana. These all close at or before seven o 'clock PM. North Carolina is at 730. They count pretty fast and there's a lot of early voting uptake.

37:36So you get a good look at the results early on. I'll just be looking, you know, are the results here what we would have forecast if the the polls were exactly right. If they're four or five points better for the Republicans, it's going to be a long night. If they're two to three points better for Democrats, it's going to be early. And then by, you know, like at least on the timing wise, what I'll say, Iowa, Kansas, yeah, definitely Virginia, Florida, New Hampshire, even these are places that reported almost all of their ballots before midnight. So we should know, and Ohio and Michigan as well, pretty quick counting.

38:12We should know the general shape of how off the polls are and whether or not we're going to be waiting for those contests in Alaska for the Senate or California for the House very early, 8, 9 p.m. And honestly, I think it'll be pretty quick because, yes, as you raise, the polls tend to be off by similar amounts nationally. So these early trends, I think, are the smart way to watch the election. Yeah. Alan, what about you? How are you watching on Tuesday? I'm going to basically the same answer, but the narrower version is I'm going to be looking at North Carolina, man. To me, especially as a Southern, North Carolina has so many of the indicators that are going to tell us what might be breaking across the region.

38:56There's so many groups in North Carolina that if they are really showing up for Democrats, it's a great sign. You know, if they flip that seat out in Western North Carolina, the gerrymandered one, Carolina 11th. Yeah, they flipped the Appalachian seat. You see black turnout there really, really booming. I think North Carolina is a pretty good indicator for a lot of the Sunbelt states in terms of what might be happening. So that's kind of the one I'm going to pay the most attention to. I would also say, if I could invite people, if I'm allowed to do this, that local insurance will be having a live stream.

39:27Mary is going to - I'm popping in. I'm popping in. We're going to party. Elliot, if you want to come by, I know you probably have a ton of obligations, but we would love it well maybe you'll you'll have to come to my live stream on substack that we're doing the greatest crossover that that's ever occurred will be that's right we're doing the marvel of election of election night live streams yeah

39:51alan elliot i'm really grateful for your time and for all of your work going into this tuesday because i just feel like um your folks i follow your folks who are adding much needed perspective to all of the sort of drumbeat horse race stuff. So keep doing what you're doing. Well, thanks for having us here. Thank you. G. Elliott Morris runs the Strength in Numbers Substack. Alan Elrod is a columnist at Liberal Currents and the CEO of the Pulaski Institution, a leftist think tank. All right, that's our show. Speaking of election live streams, we are going to be live Wednesday at 12 noon Eastern time.

40:29That is the day after the midterms. I'm going to be there with Slate's senior politics writer, Jim Newell. Also, Eamon Ismail, who's staying up late with Abdul El-Sayed. Luke Winky, who's going to be with Hassan Piker. So, you know, we're going to have the spicy thoughts. Join us. The way to do that is to sign up by checking out the link in our show notes. What Next is produced by Evan Campbell, Madeline Thames-Dusharm, and Patrick Fort. Paige Osborne is the senior supervising producer of What Next and What Next TVD. Mia LaBelle is our executive producer of podcasts here at Slate. Ben Richmond is the Senior Director of Podcast Operations.

41:03And I'm Mary Harris. Go track me down on Blue Sky. I'm at Mary Harris. Catch you back here on The Flipside.

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