Sep 16, 2026
On September 16, The Capitol Forum held the first conference call in our new 2026 Election Outlook series with our polling partner, G. Elliott Morris, founder and CEO of Wave Polling and Research and author of the Substack newsletter Strength In Numbers. The discussion focused on what voters say they want from the political parties, how concerns about higher prices are shaping public opinion, how the political landscape has changed since January 2025, and what current polling and forecasting suggest about the races for control of the House and Senate. The full transcript, which has been modified slightly for accuracy, can be found below.
ARJUN SINGH: Hey, everyone. I’m excited to be here today for a special conference call that we’re doing focused all on the midterm elections. I’m Arjun Singh, a Senior Podcast Producer here at The Capitol Forum and the host of the podcast “TCF Investigates.” And I’m here with my colleague, Paul McLeod, a Reporter here at TCF. And a man who needs no introduction, but I’m going to introduce him anyway, Executive Editor Teddy Downey.
And our special guest today is G. Elliott Morris, a Data Journalist, Pollster, and the author of the sub-stacking book “Strength in Numbers.” He also helps run forecasting for the site “FiftyPlusOne.” And before that, he was the Editorial Director of Data and Analytics at ABC News from 2023 to 2025. Elliott’s one of the most insightful writers out there right now, looking at what voters think, so we are extremely fortunate and lucky and excited to be able to have him here.
Today we’re going to look at the state of play in November’s midterms, and with a specific focus on the issues of pricing and supply. As some people know, here at The Capitol Forum we’ve done a lot of reporting on the reasons behind high prices and the role of consolidation in them, but we wanted to sit down with Eliot to actually hear how this is playing out with voters. Like, how do these shortages or price increases translate down to the ground on a political level? And how do politicians talk about them?
So, we’re also going to be taking listener questions later in the call. So, if you have any questions, make sure to drop that in the chat. We’re going to look those over and ask them later in the conversation. But given Eliot’s experience with polling, we thought he’d be a perfect guest for us today. So, Eliot, thanks for joining us today.
G. ELLIOT MORRIS: Yeah. Well, thanks for having me here to talk about the midterms.
ARJUN SINGH: Absolutely. So, I’ll hand it over to Teddy right now to kick us off.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Yeah, before we get to the question that everyone wants to know which is who’s going to win in November I wanted to ask you about your philosophy around the importance of polling to democracy, and specifically how that ties into trying to understand the true will of the voter, the true interest of the voter.
I think what appeals to me the most of what you do is a rigorous commitment to that, and also having this philosophy around why it’s important for democracy. So, we’d love to just get you to tell us a little bit about that, your book, and your commitment there.
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: Well, yeah, thanks for asking me the easy questions first. And I’m glad that my sort of orientation towards polling as a tool for democracy, as part of our democratic infrastructure, comes through my work. Because that is something I think people overlook.
And the simple truth of America, frankly, whether you like it or not, is that we are a lowercase d democracy, where what people want is supposed to matter. And that can sound trivial, or perhaps even trite. But if you believe that simple principle, that maybe to express this quantitatively, on average, the people should get what they want, or the average person should get what they want, on average, over a bunch of events, over a bunch of issues and votes, from people in Congress or their local, their local legislature, then you just have to believe that then therefore, what people want, and the problems they identify matter.
And then if you commit yourself to that ideal as a journalist or as a scholar, then it does become incumbent on you to devote part of your professional or maybe even private life to furthering that cause the sort of democratic bargain, as historians put it.
So, I happen to believe that I am a lowercase d Democrat. I’m a lowercase r Republican, as well. Because I also happen to believe that you can’t ask every single person their opinion on every single question, and like, just do whatever they say. Democracy is an outcome on average.
So, yeah, I wrote this book, “Strength in Numbers,” about this concept. I write my Substack, in part, motivated by this concept that polls matter from a democratic perspective, not just in terms of what we’re here to do eventually, which is the handicap, the election and the horse race.
TEDDY DOWNEY: I’m going to ask one more question before you get to that. Why is it so hard to do this well? Why is it so hard to understand the will of the voter, what the voter really wants?
Because, I mean, you spend a tremendous amount of time trying to figure that out. And I think there’s just a ton of noise out there that makes it very difficult. I really enjoy your Substack and work, reading your stuff, because it helps me orient all that. But it’d be great to hear from your perspective why it’s so hard to get.
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: Yeah. Well, there’s a measurement problem. Like these surveys are just very hard to pull off correctly. Because you want 1,000 or a lot of times even less people that you interview to represent 280 million adults or 210 million voters, whatever.
And that’s hard enough. I mean, you technically – to put on like my statistician hat you get the central limit theorem. So, you interview enough people, they should represent the whole population, if they are sampled randomly. But that is such a big if. As we know, not everyone has a chance of answering a survey, an equal chance of answering a survey.
And lots of polls are done in ways that do not even reach everyone. So, an online survey doesn’t talk to everyone, only those who have internet connection. Same thing with cell phones or landlines. And if you can’t be contacted, then you can’t be represented in what is essentially a microcosm of democracy, right?
So, pollsters have to use a lot of statistical adjustments we call these weighting. Or they can run statistical models to like torture the data that they do get and try to make it representative of the overall population. But there’s really only so much you can do when response rates are really low.
And to put a number on that, pollsters are calling about 200 people for every one person that they get. So, our response rates are less than one percent. And the types of people that just talk about politics with us are statistical weirdos. They’re like super engaged in politics. They have a lot of strange characteristics.
So, you have to do a lot of work to undo that bias. And it takes a lot of work, like artful work, not scientific work, to try to anticipate what potential bias and polling is going to be ahead of time. So, that’s a lot of guessing and simulation. And there’s some science behind that as well. But mostly, it’s just like thinking how you might be wrong. And frankly, there’s a lot of people out there who never spend any time thinking about how they might be wrong. But that is the one trait that makes a good pollster or a good forecaster, go to their job.
TEDDY DOWNEY: I want to turn things over to Paul here, yeah.
PAUL McLEOD: Thank you. So, given all those challenges and realities, where are we right now? What do the polls tell you is projected to happen in the midterms?
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: Yeah, given all the caveats, what’s going to happen in November? Look, I would be shocked if Republicans keep the House. I have a statistical election forecasting model published with some colleagues of mine at “FiftyPlusOne.”
And what we do is we take the national environment and we translate it to predictions at the House and the Senate level, using district and state level polls, fundraising data, demographic information about those districts and what the polls are looking like. And we come up with, oh, and very importantly, how wrong these indicators have been historically.
Polls have had a pretty rough track record. If you try to play out many different electoral simulations based on how wrong those polls were in 2024, 2016, you can come up with some prediction of what the election might look like if polls are as wrong as they have been historically. Even if you do that, Democrats are favored to win the House.
In our model, we give them around a 95 percent chance, 19 to 20, outside the traditional margin of sampling error, for those of you who are steeped in the polling wisdom. And frankly, there’s just not a whole lot Republicans can do to change those odds.
There is a typical pattern in midterm elections of the voters punishing the party in power. Donald Trump even talked about this. He was spitting political conventional or political wisdom fire at the convention that he had about a week ago. There’s just a very natural pattern of the electorate to vote out the incumbent party in a midterm. And it happens pretty much regardless of whether or not the President is popular, or the economy is good, or the President is unpopular and the economy is bad.
They pretty much always lose the seats, except 2002, right after 9-11. Without a 9-11 style political event, in other words, Republicans are going to lose the House. And the Democrats will probably end up with around 230 seats, maybe as many as they had after 2018.
And that’s just the type of result you get when the president has a 35 percent approval rating and so many Americans are worried about the one thing that we know relates to political outcomes over American history, the economy.
In the Senate, the position is a little bit different. Democrats there have a slightly tougher climb to a majority. They need 51 seats or maybe 52, if John Fetterman, the Senator from Pennsylvania, changes parties, which he says he won’t do, but he does appear on Fox News a lot. So, there’s always the concern there. And he did speak at the Republican convention a couple weeks ago. So, that is a non-zero probability. I think Democrats are slightly favored there, but it’s close enough to a 50-50 chance that I wouldn’t be putting any money on that particular.
PAUL McLEOD: So, in the Senate, we’re talking, I mean, they need a pickup of four. So, we’re talking about holding Michigan, picking up. I think a lot of people consider Maine and North Carolina pretty strong for them. And then any two of some states like Texas, Ohio, Alaska, Iowa, like some slightly more Republican leaning states.
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: That’s right. Democrats also have to hold onto Georgia, where they’re likely favored with John Ossoff, who’s sort of charismatic and popular in the state. But importantly, New Hampshire, which is emerging as something of a potential battleground between a Democratic nominee, Chris Pappas, and the former Senator from the state, John Sununu.
So, that is a potentially like Democrats might lose that seat as well. That is a variable that’s actively moving against them like every day. And we don’t have a whole lot of data out of New Hampshire. So, that is a question mark for me right now.
PAUL McLEOD: Okay. So, we see this every midterm, the incumbent party, the electorate sort of moves away from them. So, is this a typical election? Or is the shift that we’re seeing fairly standard by historical norms?
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: That’s a great question. Yeah, the shift we’re seeing right now is about 10 points. Let’s just unpack that a little bit. Democrats are leading the generic ballot by about seven or eight points among likely voters. Republicans won the House popular vote by two points in 2024. That’s how I’m getting to eight.
The shift toward Democrats was also eight points in 2018. And in 2006, from the 2004 election to 2006, the shift was closer to 11 points in the Democrats’ favor. And they also happened to pick up a lot of Senate seats above the expectation seats in places as red as Montana by recruiting candidates that were really high quality, which is something they’ve also done in the Senate this year.
So, in that regard, this is a totally normal and predictable midterm election. But what makes it look a little of a larger wave to me, of wave election, is that the President’s at a 35, 36 percent approval rating now. Okay, that is lower than Donald Trump’s approval rating was in 2018. It is slightly better than George Bush’s was in 2006. For the record, this was pretty abysmal. But going back historically, you expect a President around their midterm to be about 40.
So, Donald Trump’s doing worse than the average President is. And in these special elections, we’ve seen a much larger swing towards Democrats than the historical average, potentially even the largest swing ever towards the Democrats.
So, I think we’re probably somewhere between an average an above average size Democratic wave, very unlikely to be as favorable a Republican environment that, as people were talking about, maybe six months or a year ago, I think the Cook political report as many of these races as toss up that I would have as leaner or likely Democrat just because they’re a little slower to update those expectations.
PAUL McLEOD: It’s funny. Because for the last couple years, since 2024, Democrats have been in the state of total existential crisis., Whereas, Trump has been governing like he’s got this ironclad mandate to do whatever he wants. And just looking at where things are now, did we maybe overstate the extent of this supposed realignment that a lot of people thought we saw in 2024, when Trump was reelected?
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: Yeah, yeah, just straight up yes. There was a lot of bad punditry about the 2024 election.
In my opinion, this is based in numbers, but it is my opinion at the end of the day. Donald Trump won by 1.5 percentage points. He won the Electoral College popular vote by a couple of a couple 100,000 votes.
By all accounts, that is one of the narrowest, most narrow, political victories over the past 100 years. Only narrower are 1960 and Trump’s own election in 2016, in which he lost the popular vote. And yet, it was such a shock, right?
This is maybe the justification for many in the media in Washington, D.C. It was such a shock to the political class that it seemed like a cultural revolution of sorts, a big shift in the fortunes for right-wing politics in America. The only conclusion was, oh, look how far to the right America has drifted.
Okay, but again, in reality, that was a pretty narrow victory. I think a week after the election, the Atlantic published a piece by the Republican pollster, Patrick Ruffini, and I’m paraphrasing here, but essentially, this is what a realignment looks like. And that seemed dramatically overstated to me at the time. And looking at the change in voting behavior at the demographic level since, I think shows how overstated that case for realignment was.
So, if you look at the 2025 elections for Virginia and New Jersey governor, for example, there are huge shifts back to the left among, in particular, Hispanic and younger Americans. And these were the two groups that were cited as powering Trump’s victory, moving far to the right, undermining the traditional Democratic lean among these groups. They have gone back to the Democrats. And if you look at the New York Times surveys that just came out earlier this week, and you look at subgroup change there, it’s even more dramatic now than it was in 2025.
So, yeah, that’s always a good lesson that we shouldn’t be writing grand theories of American politics based off of just one election. Because, especially as you stare at the abyss of a midterm, it’s very likely that your party will actually end up worse off because of that level of hype or smoking the hopium, as some in the online election community say.
ARJUN SINGH: So, inside of that abyss, are there issues that voters themselves are actually gravitating to? You always hear these kinds of tensions between social issues, economic issues, debates about which ends up winning over voters at the end of the day. What have you found to be the issues that voters are really responding to right now?
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: Yeah, it is unfortunately as boring as prices and the economy. In our polling, 37 percent of Americans say prices and inflation are their most important issue. Those percentages are the exact same for Republicans, Democrats, and independents.
And if you add the percent of Americans who say that the economy and jobs is also a top concern for them, so separate from inflation, then you get six out of 10 Americans are saying essentially the economy is their most important issue.
If you then ask Americans who say they voted for Donald Trump in 2024 and now say that they are going to vote for Democrats or not vote at all in the generic ballot, what is the top reason why you have changed your mind about Donald Trump? So, what’s driving you away? We call these people defectors. Then about half of them will say the economy and the cost of living is the reason why they have changed their mind. The other half say in rough priority Trump’s personal conduct and corruption, and then immigration, and then tariffs are the other common answers here.
But by and large, this is frankly a predictable backlash election based on the President being unpopular and the economy being perceived as not working for the average American. And inflation is, to be fair, very bad. The outcomes we are likely to see flow directly from that.
I guess I should say just while we’re not to miss the point entirely, the war in Iran has been so important because it is partly a betrayal to Trump’s base, who he promised he wouldn’t start a foreign war with. And who are pretty simultaneously hawkish, but also isolationist in war in the Middle East in particular. But it also is so bad for the incumbent White House because it acts on prices. People perceive the war as having consequences for prices and for the economy, rightly so. When I say prices, I also mean the war in Iran that has acted on prices.
ARJUN SINGH: I just wanted to ask one quick question about what is the difference between Republican-leaning voters and Democratic-leaning voters in terms of how the Iran war is increasing gas prices? Do Republicans have a more favorable view of Trump? Are you seeing dips even amongst Republicans there?
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: Sure. Republicans are, of course, going to be more supportive of Donald Trump. But if you ask Americans we did this, I believe, in July do you think the war in Iran has been worth the cost, then you get, of course, about 80 percent of Democrats, 90 percent of Democrats say no. But still, about 30 percent of Republicans say the war has not been worth the cost. That was before the recent increase in diesel prices that we’re seeing now, this very likely exponential increase in gas prices. Analysts are saying we’re going to see in the next couple of weeks to months.
I imagine that number is going to get even worse. A third is only a third. But if Donald Trump loses a third, the electorate loses in a Dukakis-style blowout. It is a meaningful slice of the electorate.
PAUL McLEOD: I just wanted to really just hammer that for a moment. Because gas does remain a dollar a gallon above what it was at the start of the war. People do see the Iran war, not just in terms of a foreign policy issue, but as a real driver of that number being higher than it was earlier this year every time I drive to work.
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: The problem for Trump is that he claimed credit for lots of the policies that increased prices. He defended his decisions on the war in Iran at his convention a couple of weeks ago, sorry, last week.
Then the other high-profile example of this is the tariffs, which I think we almost memory hold this a bit because there’s so much news that Donald Trump makes constantly. But in the first three months of his presidency, he was having a press conference about all the tariffs he was launching, almost every day. That is an issue that is underwater, like 65 percent to 20 percent or 30 percent. If you’re constantly reminding voters about this policy that you’re pursuing that they associate with inflation and say they don’t approve of, then, yeah, they’re going to punish you for that somewhat obviously.
But he didn’t have to claim credit for all those policies. He did it in spite of the evident public opinion at the time. And that is going to have consequences, electoral consequences.
ARJUN SINGH: What is the democratic messaging or opening that the gas price issue presents? Is this benefiting them electorally right now?
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: Oh, sure. In May, we asked Americans, in your own words, what is the single biggest economic worry on your mind right now? I might be paraphrasing that. Then we categorized responses based on the category of things people say. A lot of people say rent. A lot of people say health care costs. This was at the beginning of the Iran war, or roughly the beginning. So, there wasn’t a whole lot of responses about Iran.
Remember, I said 37 percent of people say inflation is their number one issue. This Venn diagram is almost a circle here. About 38 percent of people said just inflation and the cost of living in general. About one in five, 20 percent of people, said gas or fuel prices. Then you had about a 10 to 10 split between groceries and layoffs and housing and health care. This is perceived to be the single biggest issue in this election.
Then if you then ask Americans about inflation do you approve of the job Donald Trump has done, getting prices down or just handling prices – and you also ask them which party do you trust to handle the economy, Donald Trump is about 50 percentage points underwater on handling prices, 75 to 25 if you remove people without an opinion.
Republicans have lost the economy, which is something that they held an advantage on in terms of do you trust Republicans to handle the economy more than Democrats for the last 25 years essentially, ever since the Clinton economic surplus era.
So, yes, it’s not just that people are anxious about prices. It’s also that they’re punishing the incumbent party who has a president who has claimed a lot of credit for inflationary policies publicly.
ARJUN SINGH: The one thing we haven’t talked about yet is data centers. I’m actually very curious to hear from you if this shows up in your research of what drives voters. Because I think, in media, we hear so much about data centers. We’ve heard politicians, left and right, go after each other about data centers. From your research, what is the public’s response to data centers right now?
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: Well, I will just flag one thing. We are actively, in the field at my polling company, asking people about AI and data centers in particular because the issue is evolving so quickly. Donald Trump has been tweeting about data centers every day for the last couple of weeks in defense of construction, where even Republican governors are now slowing down construction, perceiving a potential weakness.
This is an event that is constantly changing, and we’ll update measurement on what I’m about to say over the next couple of weeks. I’m sure we’ll get to talk about this as well in one of these future calls that we do on the election. But right now, the public opinion is people hate data centers. And they don’t necessarily blame one party more than the other for this right now. Again, I imagine that will quickly change.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst, I looked this up this morning, they had a survey out last week that showed 11 percent of people supported constructing data centers in their local area and 65 percent opposed. This was bipartisan opposition. About seven in 10 Democrats and about five in 10 Republicans opposed that construction. Even people who call themselves very MAGA Republicans, according to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, those people opposed the data center construction 42 to 25.
One interesting wrinkle here I reported on some polling on this last year is that people are more likely to oppose data center construction the more close it is to them, the closer it is to them physically. So, if you say, do you support data center construction in general? Do you support AI? At least six months ago, people would say, yeah, sure. If you ask, what about in your state, people are less likely. If you ask in your city, opinion turns against construction by about 10 points. Those numbers are six months old. I imagine all these numbers are somewhat in the order of magnitude worse now, given how toxic this has become.
And also dug up some polling data from Ipsos and Reuters. 78 percent of Americans said that they were worried that AI would raise their electricity bills. So, I think the other thing going on here is not just a general, I don’t want that big warehouse that may or may not be using local water resources, operating in my neighborhood. It’s really loud. Or it’s really unsightly, whatever. They also perceive it as acting on their one major problem, which is prices. Frankly, both of those issues are not solvable by companies constructing data centers. So, that will be their chief problem to combat in their messaging over the next six months, a year.
I guess I’m just thinking out loud, but over the last week, we’ve also had the added problem that the entire media is circulating these claims that AI might kill everyone, has a 10 percent chance of doom of killing everyone on earth. If I had to guess, that’s not going to help the data center issue either.
PAUL McLEOD: It’s one of the things that I get friends from back home asking me about. They don’t usually reach out to me about the Robertson-Patman Act or anything like that. So, you can tell it’s getting real.
In the face of all of these challenges, all of these headwinds against them, the President’s strategy seems to be to try to juice turnout, to motivate more people to go to the polls. We just had this big midterm convention, of course, where he’s throwing out some grandiose promises. I thought it was interesting, after the convention, you came out and said, it’s like Trump, some midterms. Can you explain why you think that strategy is flawed?
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: It’s natural, when your party is shutting voters, to think, if only I can get those of my true fans to turn out in the election, and then try to come up with ways to motivate turnout among your base. Donald Trump opened his remarks at the convention last week saying, there’s this normal pattern where presidents always lose after midterms. He said, this is because their side sits out, sits at home.
This is, by the way, only half true. In the 2025 elections I was mentioning earlier in Virginia and New Jersey, about 75 percent of the gains Democrats made – so, about three out of every four additional voters that they won was due to conversion, people actively changing their minds. Only about one fourth was due to turnout.
I think their diagnosis of their problem is a little hard. It’s in some ways the easiest problem that you would come up with if you were in the losing position to say, oh, let’s just try to get our side to turn out, rather than what’s going on, what’s going wrong with our policy? How can we actually change our policy to try to win people back? It’s a much harder thing to do.
In terms of the mechanics here, the reason why I think the convention is unlikely to work is because that natural strategy is unlikely to be as tailored as the White House wants it to be. The White House says, let’s have a convention. We will send all of our messaging to our fans and they’ll actually turn out to vote.
The problem is, what about everyone else? When you have a convention, everyone watches, everyone reads the news. It’s not just your base. Yes, we do have social media and hyper-targeted algorithmic social media feeds, but still a lot of normie Americans saw the convention and may have seen Donald Trump in a capacity they otherwise, wouldn’t have seen him in.
Maybe it’s being carried on broadcast news when they otherwise weren’t watching broadcast news, or otherwise would not have shown up because normally presidents don’t do midterm conventions. The problem is you also activate the other side. So, I don’t think the White House is anticipating that the unpopular policy from the administration that has put them in the position that they’re in now, that highlighting that might also turn off additional voters.
Sure enough, if you then go and look at the polling data on voters who say that they might vote, but not that they will certainly vote, those voters are more likely to be Republican. So, the White House, yeah, maybe the strategy is working. Unfortunately, for the White House, these voters also say they disapprove of the job Donald Trump is doing at a higher rate than other decided Republican voters. They say that prices are more important to their vote and they say they trust Democrats more to handle stuff like prices, the economy, terrorists, war with Iran, more than they trust Republicans.
So, this group that might be activated by the White House’s turnout efforts, actually, if anything, they look more likely to vote for Democrats, not Republicans. And so, mobilizing them might actually hurt the incumbent White House instead of helping.
PAUL McLEOD: I think this is a profound point. I mean, that’s sort of how Trump built his political success, right? Was sort of these wildcard, low propensity voters, these sort of disengaged people tended to sort of break his direction in the past. But what you’re saying, it sounds to me, is that the deeper down you dig into these people who are less likely to vote, now they are much more opposed to Trump and it could end up like flat out backfiring.
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: Yeah, well put, Paul. And the problem is that a lot of the strategists the White House consulted have, in my analysis, a pretty poor understanding of why Donald Trump won. And this goes back to some of that myth-making about Donald Trump’s victory from the beginning of our webinar here. That a lot of pundits wrote this is a big mandate for Donald Trump and for his policy for mass immigration, for aggressive terrorists especially, and for state intervention in some companies, what we would have called socialism 30 years ago.
And that diagnosis was flatly wrong. And the logic behind the convention is basically the same exact logic, that these low propensity voters are hidden right-wing MAGA voters.
No, in fact, they just don’t like the incumbent party. They are sort of doomers in a lot of respects. They feel like the economy is not working for them. They rate prices and inflation and job loss as their top economic concerns pretty routinely, regardless of who’s in charge.
The logical explanation from political science of why Donald Trump won in 2024 is that Democrats were in charge when inflation was high. So, if you then use that logic on 2026, you expect Republicans to lose because inflation is high, or at least perceived to be very high and very harsh.
PAUL McLEOD: So, let’s go to the Democrat side. Obviously, the big narrative of this midterm has been the civil war, quote-unquote civil war, between the, let’s say, Bernie left, the DSA left, and the more center left. And particularly in the, I feel, D.C. pundit brain, there’s been this consensus that’s emerged, which is that the left-wing candidates like Francesca Hong in Wisconsin have really underperformed.
And where they’ve succeeded, like with Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, they’ve really put Democrats at risk now. Because, oh, we had just elected a centrist, this would be a cakewalk. And now instead, we’ve got this DSA type guy, and now it’s in play. And I just wanted to ask you because I know you’ve talked a little bit about how the reality is a bit more complex than that — how much does that accurately summarize the state of what’s happening in Democratic politics, or in politics more broadly?
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: I think the ideological divide here is secondary to let me be a little more specific, I think the ideological divide in the Democratic Party is secondary to an anti-system or sort of establishment divide. And let me explain maybe a little bit what I mean by that.
In our polling in July, we asked Americans whether or not they felt favorably to Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Zohra Mamdani, AOC, various members from the sort of center establishment wing of the party, and the fringe sort of left. There’s also some more fringe members of the Democratic Party that are in the center. Gavin Newsom arguably isn’t viewed as establishment as Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. It depends on your persuasion, I guess.
We then looked at how individual Democrats’ ratings of these various figures predicted who they would vote for in presidential primaries. And we also asked them a lot of questions about whether or not they felt like the Democratic Party put regular people first, whether or not they wanted the Democratic Party to move left or move to the right. And the ratings that people gave of these more center left figures versus the more insurgent left figures in the Democratic Party did not predict their overall orientation towards whether or not they thought the Democratic Party was serving them or not. But in absolute terms, whether or not people rated Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer well predicted those things.
So, whether or not people consider themselves Democrats or think the Democratic Party is working for them is very closely related to their views of the sort of most establishment Democratic figures, the ones literally setting the agenda in Congress. And how they felt sort of on what we might proxy as an ideological spectrum certainly, how they described themselves ideologically — did not predict those things.
So, that’s only like a rough proxy here. But we also just asked Democrats a bunch of questions like we asked them what they meant when they said the Democratic Party should fight more. And all of this is like Democrats should fight more for the working person rather than like the Democrats should be fighting the center or fighting the left, depending on where they were. They just felt like politics wasn’t really working for them.
ARJUN SINGH: Does that translate into like sentiments from voters towards regulating business, feelings about big business? Because I think part of what Paul had mentioned and what you were talking about, insurgents versus the establishment, is big debates on policy over the role of big business and the role of government in regulating that. What do voters see in those issues? Like do they see that debate when they see these central left versus insurgent candidates?
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: I think there is risk there. The thing that I can just identify anecdotally in the Democrats right now is any individual, any organization, any institution, that can be cast as this system, the establishment is at risk of being a punching bag for what we call the left, which is really a more anti-system movement that at least that’s sort of the voter psychology I’m identifying in this segment.
So, I think, yes, there is risk there in that identification, but this doesn’t necessarily come up a lot. In our own openended questions, we ask voters all the time, like what are the problems that are ailing you? What do you want the government to focus more on? Very few people say like more business or less business regulation. But I think the AI data centers conversation we’re seeing is something of a live wire here.
Since we’re talking about the Democratic Party, I’ll just say a lot of the left-wing backlash to data centers is also wrapped up in negative feelings about billionaires and about tech companies and about capitalism. So, in a way, the data centers have become exactly what you’re identifying, sort of a punching bag for the anti-establishment team.
TEDDY DOWNEY: So, I have a question that it sort of tries to tie some of these things together, which is you’ve got polling saying both voters, Democrats and Republicans, want changes on pricing. They want the prices to come down. Democratic voters really want something to be done about corruption.
You just mentioned data centers. A lot of people want something that’s against the status quo, against the establishment, that’s against the current system of how things work. And if you look at how Washington currently works, it’s pretty much, you know, centrists are sort of aligned with big business, right? They’re doing policy that big business wants. And so, do you think there’s a potential that there’s just — let’s say there’s a wave election and Democrats come in and they start pushing in order to try to deliver for voters, to the extent that they want to do that, they’re going to be pushing for more aggressive anti-corruption, cracking down on price gouging, the type of stuff that our audience really listens to and pays a lot of attention to antitrust or sort of anti-monopoly policy.
Do you see that as potentially becoming a bigger way for policymakers, particularly Democrats, to try to appeal to who delivered them this win, should they end up winning the way that you’re saying?
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: Yeah. What is really likely to happen is that the 2028 Democratic presidential primary in particular will be a contest of ideas for like how much damage you can do to the establishment in showing that you are for the average person. And politically, the establishment means what the members of the left call the corporate wing of the Democratic party and the consulting class. And it also means those businesses that are closely aligned with Republicans and big business. And I imagine it means a lot of AI.
And the strategy here is Democrats are going to try to prove their anti-system, antiestablishment bona fides by coming up with as many ways as possible to, or the most sort of evocative ways as possible that really connect them with that average Democratic primary voter of showing that they will fight to put regular voters before the system.
So, similar to Arjun’s question, I think if you are a representative of a business that could conceivably be spun as the establishment making conditions worse for workers or whatever Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and et cetera are going to say then you are at risk there. Yeah.
ARJUN SINGH: In terms of 2024 voters, do people have regrets that you found in your research? Like Trump’s win was driven by concerns over the economy and immigration. You’ve talked a lot about how the economy is now not in favor for Trump. Immigration, actually, that would be something I would be curious to hear from you. How have people responded to Trump’s immigration? Is that still a salient issue for him?
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: Salience is a great question on immigration. If you ask Americans what their most important problem is, only about 2 percent say the border. Somewhere around 6 percent or 7 percent say deportations. And another 6 percent or 7 percent say immigration.
This makes sense to me. What did the Border Patrol say? 250,000 crossings last year and no releases back into the U.S. versus millions a year when Joe Biden was in power. You could say the border problem has been solved. And there’s no visibility of people crossing the border on Fox News or network news every night anymore like there was in 2024 when network news was showing footage of fences in El Paso on the daily.
So, the salience of the border has decreased. But the salience of internal displacement and police efforts in American cities has increased correspondingly, somewhat changing what voters mean when they say immigration or what Walter Lippman would call the pictures in our heads when we think about issues or other people, when they think about immigrants and immigration.
I think I mentioned this earlier. If you ask voters who say that they voted for Donald Trump in 2024 who now say they won’t vote for him, why? About a third will say actually it’s 38 percent. So, closer to 40 percent will say something about immigration and deportation or treatment of legal immigrants and citizens by ICE in particular. And that is higher than the percent who say even stuff like Trump’s personal conduct and corruption are important to them. So, yeah, that’s a pretty live issue. I think that has pushed voters away from him.
Now you started that question by asking, has there been regret of people’s 2024 vote? Yes, absolutely. So, the University of Massachusetts Amherst asks this question every time they poll nationally. Do you regret who you voted for? Donald Trump retains the support of about five out of six people who say they voted for him. So, about one out of six, about 15 percent, say they regret voting for him and would vote a different way. Like I mentioned earlier, 15 percent is not a whole lot, but it is enough to make election outcomes decisive for the other party if you reran that election.
Just by way of comparison, I think about two percent of Kamala Harris’s voters say they regret voting for her. I actually have no idea who those people are. But that’s the difference in numbers here, 2 percent versus 15 percent for Donald Trump. So, that is significant. Yeah.
ARJUN SINGH: And then you had mentioned tariffs earlier, but I’m curious, as we’re talking about regrets and everything, as inflation is playing a role in people’s minds, have people turned on tariffs or ideas of protectionism? What do they think about that right now?
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: I’ll have to get back to you on the protectionism idea. Like, yeah, we should figure out if Americans are more isolationist or protectionist than they were in trade policy. Do they support free trade as a concept more? I’m not so sure. Because what tends to go on here is that voters are just reacting negatively to a generally unpopular president and to the consequences of policy. They don’t really have a whole lot of well thought out ideological commitments.
Certainly, toward the parties, that is true. Regardless of what everyone in this room we’re all operating with very, very fine-tuned ideological labels in our heads and understanding of ideological labels. Most Americans do not have that, and they definitely don’t have a commitment to free trade or protectionism.
But yeah, like I mentioned, voters do oppose the tariffs, regardless of what I’m just saying about ideological labels. The policy is unpopular. About 65 percent, 70 percent of Americans say they disapprove of the tariffs. Americans will say that they’re worried about tariffs increasing prices. So, yeah, that is a negative issue. I imagine Republicans are going to have trouble whipping votes for tariff policies, for protectionist policies in the future.
TEDDY DOWNEY: You spent a lot of time on your Substack looking at polls coming in, how things could change between now and the election, generic ballot, likely voters. What are some of the things we should be looking out for between now and the election to see how big of a wave is it going to be? Are the Republicans going to make a comeback? Is there any opportunity there outside of, like you said, some kind of war situation, some kind of dramatic events?
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: You mean 2030? Is that what you asked about?
TEDDY DOWNEY: Oh no, sorry. No, between now and the election. Sorry.
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: Oh, in 2026.
TEDDY DOWNEY: 2026, yeah.
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: I thought you were asking me, will there be another thermostatic backlash against the Democrats as they win power?
TEDDY DOWNEY: No, no, no, no, no.
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: Yeah, I imagine the situation, well, the traditional pattern is for the situation to get worse for the incumbent party as you get closer. Post-Labor Day, the party in power, typically loses about two percentage points of vote margin. So, if anything, the current political situation is like the optimistic case for Republicans. Things tend to get a lot worse as people tune in and start processing information.
And those opinions are not super elastic. So, if all the refineries in the Middle East were magically repaired tomorrow and oil got teleported to San Francisco, then we wouldn’t actually expect that to have a huge increase in support for Republicans. Lots of voters’ opinions are already set.
PAUL McLEOD: So, one thing Republicans have going for them is, at least so far, a pretty substantial spending advantage. On the other hand, we haven’t really seen that translate so much in terms of special election results. And I guess if they’re playing defense in a lot more districts, maybe that cuts into that. How do you see the money side of this playing out of these midterms?
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: Well, campaign spending is a lot better at moving votes in primaries than it is in moving votes in general elections. So, we have seen a lot of Republican spending, and there are lots of Republican commitments for the general election. And I’m just going to give you an example. There was like $60 million spent in the Democratic primary in Michigan, the contest between Abdul El-Sayed and Hayley Stevens for the Senate seat there.
And so, I think we’re all set up because that race had so much money, and it looks like it increased support for Hayley Stevens. We’re all set up right now in the middle of September to think that the money that we’re about to see is going to have a big effect in the race. And certainly, on the left, those who are opposed to Elon Musk are worried about the amount of money he has pledged to Republicans as well.
The political science here is pretty concrete. Spending has positive but small effects in general elections. And in the individual race, you reach a point of diminishing returns fairly quickly, in the millions, not in the tens of millions.
So, in our House election model, for example, a race that goes from having 50 percent of contributions given to a Democratic candidate to 100 percent of contributions for a Democratic candidate moves by about three percentage points for the Democrat. So, that’s the equivalent of going from like $5 million to $50. And the other side, not spending at all.
I’m one of those people who thinks that differential spending at the national level here might matter at the margins. But the most important thing is that the President of the United States has a 35 percent approval rating and you can’t really spend your way out of that problem.
TEDDY DOWNEY: If you have questions, put it in the chat here. We’ll get to it. We’re about to let Elliot go. But if you have a question, put it in the chat.
One thing we do see a lot in these elections is there’s correlation. You’ll say, well, this Senate race is 60 percent and this one’s 60 percent and this one’s 60 percent. I’m curious, if it is a wave, would you see all those close Senate races likely going to the Democrat in all those close races? And then also, are there any Senate races that we didn’t mention like a South Carolina or something else that, in a big wave could be in play, that no one’s really looking at all, Nebraska, one of these wildcard races?
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: Ah, you stole my race. It was going to be Nebraska, yeah. Republicans have multiple things going against them in a state like Nebraska. First off, farm tariffs have been pretty terrible for farmers in Nebraska and Iowa. Iowa is another state where Democrats might pick up a seat. If you look at changes in opinion toward Donald Trump, there has been a much larger shift away from Trump in places like Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, the plain states. That’s one thing going against Republicans in Nebraska.
The other thing is that the Democrats are running as nominally independent candidate who does not have a D next to their name on the ballot. Regardless of how much money Republicans have spent and will spend defining that candidate, the independent Dan Osborne as basically a Democrat. There are a lot of voters who will never see that messaging and will just see the party labels on the ballot. And that sort of short circuiting of the normal partisan heuristic among voters might be enough for Democrats to pull off a seat in a place that Donald Trump won by, I think, 24, 26 points or something, in 2024. So, that is a significant undercard seat maybe for the Democrats or the independents who caucus with Democrats.
Otherwise, I think we’ve named all of them. So, Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Alaska, North Carolina, and Maine. Those are the Republican held seats that are toss ups or likely to flip. North Carolina, I think, is probably gone at this point. The current chair of the Republican National Committee is running there. And that is an association with the Republican establishment that you don’t want in a year where the Republican president has a 35 percent approval rating, right? That’s just like pretty hard from the anti-system point of view.
You asked about money. The money could matter in these close seats on a one off. Like in Ohio, there’s a lot of crypto money being spent potentially against Sherrod Brown. Any seat that is won by less than a percentage point, you can say, oh, this or that factor matter. And so, my that might matter there.
Sorry, Teddy, the last thing you asked about was correlation between the seats. There’s not as much and this is sort of walking hour — but it’s not so much that there’s correlation between the seats as there’s correlation in polling error. And what’s going on here is that if polls in Iowa or Ohio don’t have enough Republicans in them, because Republicans aren’t answering the phone, that is likely to also be true among Republicans in North Carolina, Alaska, Maine, Iowa, what have you.
So, there’s sort of shared error measurement error in the surveys and other tools we use for handicapping. And that is why the election prediction is so hard. But it’s also why forecasting models are so helpful is because we can simulate what would happen with different levels of correlated bias. Yes, super walking.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Are you worried about any bias, either way in the polls that you’re seeing so far? I know you had a recent entry on this.
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: Yeah, you can really convince me either way. You could tell me there’s an endemic nonresponse where Republicans just don’t like talking about politics. They don’t trust you. I could buy that. You could equally say turnout is so high among Democrats that the adjustments pollsters are making we talked about adjustments pollsters are making earlier in this call that those are causing surveys to underestimate turnout among Democrats or underestimate how democratic independents have become. I could buy that. Also, we just, by definition, cannot know what the non-response will be until election day. And that’s where the uncertainty and simulation become so helpful.
ARJUN SINGH: Well, thank you everyone for joining today’s call. That wraps up our call today. Elliot, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. And I want to thank Teddy and Paul for also taking the time out of their day to join us.
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TEDDY DOWNEY: And Elliot, thank you so much for doing this. And we’re super excited to keep on hosting these calls with you in the future. So, thank you. And excited to see what you come up with.
G. ELLIOTT MORRIS: I’m happy to be here.
TEDDY DOWNEY: This concludes the call. Thank you, everyone.
