🇺🇲 Trump’s strongest soldiers lag run-of-the-mill Democrats in midterm motivation

We’ve been tracking motivation in the midterms for quite some time, and this month Kristen broke the numbers down by MAGA vs. non-MAGA Republicans.

MAGA Republicans are more motivated to vote, but even they lag all Democrats and leaners by 9 points in being extremely motivated to vote in the midterms.

We asked a similar question to more directly isolate the Trump factor in the midterms — getting an even wider spread. This question specifically focused on their party winning control of Congress to either stop or help Trump’s agenda. All Democrats were 16 points more extremely motivated than MAGA Republicans. Non-MAGA Republicans were 35 points less extremely motivated than Democrats.

Along similar lines, the most liberal Democrats are much likelier than the most conservative Republicans to consider politics extremely important to their personal identity. The majority of Americans not at the ideological extremes are nowhere to be found on this measure.

Among very liberal white Democrats, the number is even higher: 49 percent.

🗺️ Democrats go up in the redistricting war

Democrats narrowly got their map 10-1 in Virginia, pending a court challenge. But the vote by the new Congressional district was not 10-1, but more likely 9-2 — with an additional 2 districts very close.

The shifts among different demographic groups line up very close to what we saw in the 2025 election. Most places swung against the measure, especially rural areas most affected by the new maps. But once again, the nonwhite Trump 2024 voter didn’t show up in big numbers.

I’ll also re-up this chart from my post on Wednesday, showing the unexpectedly close result was a function of stronger Republican turnout—better even than 2024 and possibly 2021. The implication is that there was little net persuasion in the referendum and that the closeness of the result came down to Republicans being given a real reason to vote. That wasn’t enough in Virginia, but could hold lessons for the midterms.

🪖 Opposition to the war in Iran comes not from MAGA but new Trump 2024 voters

Earlier this year, More in Common released their typology of the Trump 2024 voter, breaking them down into four groups. Like others, they found opposition to the war coming not from within MAGA itself, but what they term the “Reluctant Right” more loosely attached to the Republican Party. While 22% of Trump voters overall oppose the war, 54% the Reluctant Right do.

😞 “The tragic twenties”

Derek Thompson has a piece you should read very much in line with what I wrote a few weeks ago on America’s new era of discontent.

Most measures of satisfaction are plummeting, and that includes personal happiness, right direction/wrong track, economic sentiment, and Presidential approval.

He finds a culprit: the pandemic that never really ended. And I buy that, given that the crappy polling about the economy stuck around even after the economy bounced back.

🤖 The growing class divide in AI

80% of US adults who report using Claude in the previous week live in households earning $100,000 or more a year, while just 37% of users of Meta AI do. That reflects a growing segmentation of the AI marketplace not unlike the blue bubble/green bubble divide of iOS and Android.

I want to focus less on the margin than the turnout, which was not only well to the right of 2025, but also 2024 and maybe even 2021—when Republicans won.

Republicans obviously didn’t succeed in defeating the referendum, but it showed that the fight was winnable, and more money invested early might have made a difference.

Absent a victory, Virginia provides Republicans with a rare optimistic counterpoint to the building narrative of a Blue Wave. If the fight is framed the right way, Republican voters will turn out the same or better relative to Democrats than 2024, even with an unpopular president in the White House. And if they recreate this performance even to some degree, they are virtually assured control of the U.S. Senate and will hold their own in the House, with a fighting chance to keep their majority.

Virginia and the recent special elections tell the same story

The turnouts in Virginia and the other special elections appear to contradict each other, but they actually tell the same story: nothing motivates turnout like threats to your partisan identity.

Democrats have been turning out all cycle because they’re virtually powerless in Washington and winning more Congressional seats is the only hope they have of slowing down the Trump White House. Meanwhile, Republicans have been watching contentedly from the sidelines as Trump moves more assertively to reshape the American political order than he did in his first term.

Early in 2025, this storyline of Democrats reeling and in disarray gave Republicans hope that 2026 would go better for them than 2018. But ironically, what appeared like weakness has turned into a Democratic superpower. A Democratic Party that appears weak and powerless made it easier for Republican voters to fall asleep. Meanwhile, Democrats remain as eager as ever to crawl on glass to stop Trump.

Echelon polling reveals this asymmetry across both parties. 82% of Democrats say it’s extremely important for their party to take control of Congress to stop Trump from carrying out his agenda. Just 55% of Republicans say the same about keeping control of Congress to help Trump carry out his agenda. While a majority of Republicans say that Trump will mostly be blocked from enacting his agenda if Democrats win the midterms, fully 38% say that Trump will still mostly be able to carry out his agenda.

Among Republican voters, there’s no palpable sense that the midterms really matter, because so much of what they can see with their own eyes and ears tells them it doesn’t. Trump dominates politics and is able to move forward on many of his priorities even disregarding his own majority in Congress. The threat of impeachment isn’t really a threat — it was tried twice before, and there are never going to be the votes in the Senate to convict.

In a bad political environment, Virginia was a controlled experiment in what could happen if you could conjure up a credible threat to Republican voters: an assertive Democratic state trifecta moving swiftly to steal four of the party’s Congressional districts. And Republicans turned out in 2021 numbers to stop this, though this obviously wasn’t enough.

But there is a lesson for the midterms. Republicans beating the spread has less to do with coming up with better defenses of Trump’s policies than it does with getting Republican voters off the sidelines by convincing them that giving Democrats power is really a threat.

Redistricting helps the defenders

We do have a somewhat decent example of an incumbent party beating the spread in a midterm — 2022.

Mechanically, what we saw happen in real time was the Dobbs decision move polls and primary voting from a 6-7 point Democratic deficit to a 2-3 point deficit. This was still not enough for an outright Democratic win, but it did get some low-propensity Democrats off the sidelines to prevent a complete wipeout. This and January 6th changed the narrative on who the most threatening and powerful actors in American politics were from the Biden Administration to Trump and MAGA.

The mythology around this ended up being so strong that Democrats decided to run it back in 2024, to disastrous effect: leading Biden to run for re-election and trapping Democrats into an issue set with no appeal to the swing electorate.

Something else happened in 2022 that was equally consequential: it was a redistricting cycle. That year, both parties worked to redraw maps to take swing seats off the board. More money chasing fewer seats meant a greater ability for the parties to create their desired political environments in these districts, one different from the national environments. So, while the national vote still indicated a good Republican year, this didn’t really show up in swing seats because Democrats were able to spend to defend them.

As a general rule, more spending will tend to push races back to the partisan baseline by bringing out the low-hanging fruit voter: one who will reliably vote for the incumbent party but is currently under-motivated by the incumbent’s bad approvals. The math here is simple: a good political environment maxes the attacking party out on turnout, something we see most prominently in special elections, but the flip side is more opportunities for the defending party to rile up their mid-propensity partisans.

The current mid-decade redistricting cycle further narrows the playing field of competitive districts. Beyond wherever the exact breakdown of gains and losses ends up at, the sorting of Congressional districts structurally benefits the incumbent party by allowing them to defend fewer seats with more financial resources.

Good vibes—and their limits

Before Virginia, I had a tweet that summarized the positive Republican case, one that Josh Barro likened to the Simon Rosenberg hopium case on my recent appearance on Central Air.

Much of this scenario admittedly rests on the ability to create good vibes, something that our body politic seems to have developed an allergy to. It also depends on Trump himself not getting in the way of them—oftentimes a tall order.

But in many ways, the bar Republicans need to clear is fairly low. The median state in the Senate voted for Trump by double digits. Just motivating core Republican voters to get off the sidelines should be enough to win those races. Anything in the service of that helps.

Good vibes alone won’t do it, though. The larger part I didn’t cover in that particular tweet is that the GOP needs to deploy a credible contrast message with the Democrats, one that shows their voters that they’re a threat, just like they were in Virginia. That could be around border security, deportations of criminal illegal aliens, or showing how their policies would increase costs for the average American—making the case that this was exactly what happened when they were last in power.

That’s actually a more Trumpian approach than just trying to sand the rough edges off by simply talking more about the cost of living or going after the pharmaceutical industry or banning Congressional stock trading. These ideas might poll well, but the Biden team fell into this trap. You can do what you think are good things, but good luck getting voters to believe you’ve done them or that they’ll have any impact on their daily lives.

The more plausible path is negatively defining the Democrats—the kind of scorched earth campaign that Trump enjoys and knows how to run.

I’ll acknowledge there are very real and practical obstacles to an approach like this succeeding. It’s unlikely we’ll get something on the order of the Dobbs decision that makes Trump not the main character. But if you think that Republicans are polling pretty close to a floor right now, there are pretty clear ways to at least marginally improve that situation that don’t involve somehow convincing people that the cost of living is no longer a problem. In Virginia, we saw glimmers of how that could play out.

🤖 The false promise of silicon samples

Following polling analysis cycle after cycle is like being stuck in the movie Groundhog Day. If there’s a polling miss, people will swear off horserace polling, but the breathless reporting of head-to-head polls always returns. Pollsters who publish outlier results or don’t weight on education are mocked, yet those pollsters persistently reappear.

This also applies to more novel approaches. In 2024, there was some buzz around a company called Aaru that promised synthetic AI respondents could be both cheaper and more predictive than real polls. The basic premise: instead of polling a real person, poll an LLM fed a diet of the latest news. Their results ended up tracking closely with the polling averages — at the time, a tell that this new AI form of “polling” was basically a copy-paste of normal polling rather than providing any sort of value-add. It ended up being just as off as the polling averages and forecasts which showed the presidential race a tossup.

They’re now back in 2026 with claims of having signed up midterm campaigns. The forecasters and aggregators aren’t letting the silicon samples anywhere near their averages. Silver Bulletin’s Eli McKown-Dawson writes this week that it’s because they’re not real polls. Nate Silver himself didn’t mince words on this during the ‘24 cycle:

I consider myself a big proponent of AI in polling. You can actually use AI to write pretty good questions. You can also use it to analyze a survey pretty well. It used to be replacement-level intern-level stuff, but you can feel it inching up the food chain with every model release. You also have several companies offering AI moderation of focus groups or in-depth interviews, which is really exciting use case if it helps scale an extremely valuable but underutilized part of opinion research.

You can probably replace almost every part of the polling process with AI, maybe even the pollsters themselves.

What you can’t replace is the respondents.

The crux of why is this: polling exists to tell us what we don’t already know about what the public thinks. LLMs are by definition a synthesis of all the things we already know. The likes of Aaru will say that they feed their silicon samples a media diet to update their preexisting beliefs. But this is a classic garbage-in, garbage-out problem. What you’ll likely get is a highly media-filtered, CW-addled version of what we think the public thinks. Which is why their results hewed so closely to conventional media polls in 2024. In the end, the results could not surpass traditional approaches in the same way that AI can replace bad writing with average writing, but doesn’t on its own produce great writing.

It might be possible for an LLM to predict what people feel about, say, the state of the economy. Congratulations: that’s 1% of polling. A ton of private polling is on pretty obscure issues where there isn’t much if any reporting yet. I got texted and took a poll like that this week. Afterwards, I Googled what was being tested—and nothing. Likewise, lots of political polling — the majority by volume — is in downballot races with next to zero media coverage. If one candidate’s numbers start moving because of some targeted direct mail or under the radar Facebook ads, it’s unlikely that will make it into media coverage or into Aaru’s AI models — but it absolutely will show up if you actually ask people.

For a long time, we’ve been promised the sexy new toy that will eventually kill off traditional polling. In 2014 and 2016, I watched as many in the industry got snookered by Cambridge Analytica promising a fancy-sounding form of behavioral targeting. The firm predicted personality traits based on conventional voting and demographic data and then used the personality types to predict political behavior. (Just using the voting and demographic data to build models directly would have been too boring.) The hype cycle here feels a lot like Cambridge Analytica before the fall.

The Silver Bulletin folks do make a concession that silicon samples might be useful for modeling. But this use case is already well covered by existing machine learning techniques, whether Silver’s election forecasting or individual-level voter scores. We already know how to project out the likely views of everyone in a population based on survey data — but they need to be based on samples of real voters.

Where AI might actually be useful to polling is in translating raw data to linguistic outputs—exactly the thing LLMs are designed to do. Let’s say I give an AI model raw scores for an individual voter across different issue areas. Could it spit out an ad or text message copy entirely personalized to them? I could see that. But it all starts with original survey work to actually get voters to tell us the things that will always remain obscured from large language models.

Need an expert for your conference or fly-in to break down the midterms or the latest trends in politics, demographics, and AI? Visit my public speaking page or get in touch directly.

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🎙️ Two quick hits this week

Great to join the gang over at Central Air to talk realignment, Iran, and more:

Central Air

Party of the People?

Dear listeners…

Listen now

12 days ago · 12 likes · 1 comment · Josh Barro, Megan McArdle, Ben Dreyfuss, and Patrick Ruffini

And also at WSJ Opinion Live in DC:

👶 The liberal baby bust

Charlie Smirkley has been diving into different data sources to signal boost earlier work by the Institute for Family Studies about a growing ideological gulf in childbearing. At ages 25-35, conservative women are about twice as likely to have children as liberal women.

It doesn’t take much to project the consequences of something like this well out into the future. If these trends hold, descendants of today’s conservatives will be over 80% of the population by 2100. That is among the native-born, and there is going to continue to be a lot of international migration, but there’s a book that’s partly about why you shouldn’t bet on them being liberal either.

Now, ideology isn’t a heritable trait. Children don’t perfectly mirror their parents’ political views. But a solid majority do.

The split in child-rearing is also a function of the growing cultural, geographic, and psychological cleavage in the country. It used to be much easier to switch parties if the Democrats or Republicans were more in fashion at any given point. Now, party and ideology are increasingly aligned with innermost values and family dynamics. You also see meaningful differences in teens’ mental state based on the party their parents are in. So, parents clearly seem to be having some impact. And to the extent that parents are inculcating in their children a set of values, those might have once been incidental to politics but they’re now central.

As far as overall rates of fertility go, the native-born population is still going down, as young conservatives and liberals both have a fertility rate below 2, the replacement rate.

A piece in The Upshot says not to worry, as fertility is being delayed and women are making up for it with births in their 40s.

But that turns out to a “felony level chart-crime,” according to Dartmouth professor Paul Novosad. In raw numbers, the rise in births for older women is not even a tenth of the drop among young women.

😡 The UK’s angry young women

Going back to a common Intersection theme of everything about modern US politics actually being a global phenomenon, Scarlett Maguire has some groundbreaking new polling of Gen Z in the UK showing the hostility that young women have towards young men — and that young men actually don’t feel in return. Some of the politics here are absolutely wild:

Young women are 26 pts less favourable to capitalism than young men, and feel much more positively towards communism than capitalism.

Women u25 dislike capitalism so much, they view it as (un)favourably as fascism.

UK should pay slavery reparations by a 2-1 margin

And:

U30 women are 3x as likely to hold a negative view of young men than the other way around

Just 35% of u25 women hold a positive view, only 11% a very positive view

This is a bleak story, but not a surprising one given today’s highly gendered information spaces.

In education too, we’ve seen massive segregation by gender, with the choice to finish or even to go to college falling along gender and political party lines. The share of Republicans who say they’re not interested in graduating college has doubled since the turn of the century. And the rate for Republican men is especially high: four times that of Democratic women. So, college becomes even more female and liberal.

This plays out in actual surveys of college graduates, who have moved well to the left in recent years. Some have speculated that this is just because of compositional changes — grads becoming more female or nonwhite. The key chart in this piece from Paul Heideman is a bit hard to read, but it debunks the idea: college grads are getting more liberal because all groups within academia are getting more liberal, including white men. And that returns to the point of the chart above: even as demographics play some role, the people opting out of college are disproportionately Republicans.

⛪ Young male revival?

Talk about most things this week fitting a theme: young women zooming left and going to college, men maybe moving right and not pursuing higher ed. And now, the Gallup finding widely shared this week about young men bucking the trend towards secularization and turning to religion.

🫏 A “nature is healing” moment for Democrats

In-party favorability for Congressional Democrats has overtaken Congressional Republicans, ending (for now) a brief interlude of Republicans doing better on this score. The underlying mechanism here was Democratic base anger that their leaders weren’t fighting Trump hard enough at the outset of his term, reversing the common pattern where this was always more the Republican complaint about their leaders. YouGov finds this has reversed, possibly a sign of base Democrats predictably rallying around the flag for the midterms. (If you can call net negative favorability for your party in Congress that…)

🏛️ The Big Sort of Congressional districts

Tom Wood’s most recent visual shows the realignment at the Congressional district level, where wealthier districts now vote Democratic, and poorer districts vote Republican.

📺 More of the fastest growing YouTube channels lean right

Kyle Tharp has the breakdown of YouTube subscriber growth in Q1, where Turning Point USA added over 1.5 million subscribers in one quarter alone.

📰 2.2 million NYT articles as data

A new freely available dashboard makes it easy to view trends in 2.2 million articles published by The York Times since 2000.

😡 America’s new age of discontent

Americans think the economy just plain sucks.

In 2024, you might have thought that electing Donald Trump would reset the public’s view of the economy back to what it was during Trump’s first term. After all, that’s people back then said they voted for. As I’ve noted before, there was reason to think this might work: economic perception rose sharply in the transition from Obama to Trump in 2016 and stayed pretty high throughout his first term—withstanding the shocks of the Covid pandemic.

That hasn’t happened this time.

A Reuters chart of economic approval over the last three presidencies drives the point home. Economic approval did briefly recover on Trump taking office in 2025 and then it quickly reset back to Biden-era levels. In the midst of the Iran war, it’s nosedived to a new low of 29% in their polling.

Even if inflation worries eventually subside, it seems likely that AI job loss anxiety will be next as the main narrative d…

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📊 Democrats no longer outnumber Republicans in the electorate

YouGov’s deep dive into the Cooperative Election Study — which has interviewed 60,000 Americans in every even-numbered year since 2006 — shows a consistent decline in the share of the electorate identifying as Democratic, now down to a near-even break with Republicans.

This is a trend I wrote about right after the 2024 election, except that in exit polls, Republicans actually outnumber Democrats and have since 2020. But it’s good to have a longitudinal dataset with solid subgroup breaks on party ID to do this analysis on. These trends by group confirm that the trend has been consistent across generations, with all groups getting more Republican as they get older.

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⛽ Americans don’t hate the Iran strikes. They hate what comes next at the pump.

Military action against Iran isn’t especially unpopular: in our latest omnibus, approval of U.S. military operations against Iran runs at a net -6 (43% support, 49% oppose) — better than Trump’s overall job approval (net -16) and far better than his foreign policy numbers (net -21). We also found that actual support for the strikes outpaces support for a theoretical Iran strike from January, essentially the same thing we saw before and after the Venezuela operation.

Despite the MAGA base actually being united on Iran, and the not-terrible numbers on the strike itself, Trump’s approval is at a new low. And the reason why seems pretty clear: rising gas prices from the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz striking an affordability raw nerve. While Venezuela was a long-term net positive for U.S. energy supply, Iran is a short term net negative. Americans can be relatively deferential to a Pre…

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🫏 The Democratic Party’s moderates are hiding in plain sight

A new Manhattan Institute survey of nearly 2,600 Democratic voters finds a coalition that’s far more moderate than its loudest voices suggest. The party breaks into three blocs: Moderates (47%), Progressive Liberals (37%), and a “Woke Fringe” (11%) that takes consistently maximalist positions. Just 22% want the party to move further left while 38% want it to move toward the center. On issue after issue — immigration, trans policy, DEI, crime — the median Democrat looks nothing like the activist left that dominates the discourse.

🗳️ The 26 seats that will decide the House

DecisionDeskHQ has mapped out the 26 Republican-held districts most likely to flip in November. Five are seats Harris carried in 2024, but the main battlegrounds will be the 11 seats that Trump carried by 5 points or less. (And yes, this is all still subject to further redistricting in states like Virginia and Florida.)

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⭐ Lone Star primary takeaways

• White voters are in the drivers’ seat of Democratic primaries. Much was made of a Latino vote surge in the Democratic primary, but in fact, turnout surged more in white counties, especially in white, college-educated suburbs. That was the key to James Talarico’s victory. The education divide is increasing white liberal control of Democratic primary, jeopardizing the historic veto power Black voters have had in many primaries. Black voters came out strong for Jasmine Crockett, but she was unable to break through much beyond that to build a multiracial coalition that also included Hispanic and Asian voters, both groups that backed Talarico.

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After 88 years of tracking how Americans view their president, Gallup has quietly exited the presidential approval polling business. Writing for DDHQ, Geoffrey Skelley breaks down what this means — and why it’s not as surprising as you might think.

The immediate numerical impact on polling averages will be modest, since approval is one of the most-polled questions in American politics. But Gallup’s departure isn’t without consequence. The firm had been a consistent outlier on the low end of Trump’s approval numbers during his second term, so its absence could nudge aggregate averages slightly upward. More broadly, it ends a nine-decade continuous time series that has served as a foundational benchmark for understanding public attitudes toward the presidency.

Gallup’s pullback from political polling has been gradual. After a poor performance in the 2012 presidential race, it stopped surveying elections entirely ahead of 2016. It scaled back f…

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The phrase “silent majority” that derived from the speech is seen as marking a jumping off point for cultural polarization. But whatever version of polarization Nixon was cooking with was extremely popular, boosting his net approval to +47 points.

As a result of examples like this and those in the decades that followed, political reporters have been trained on the idea that a President’s job approval rating is highly responsive to the events of the day. Any fluctuation in these ratings however small must be due to whatever is in the news that week and definitely not random statistical noise.

I raise the Nixon example as evidence of the fact that presidential job approval is much less variable than it once was. There have been more recent examples of presidential approval jumping into the 90s overnight, but these involved the U.S. entering major wars. Nixon was able to engineer a 20 point bump just by giving a speech. The idea of Donald Trump — or Joe Biden or Barack Obama or Bill Clinton — doing this is laughable on its face.

Not only do modern approval ratings not fluctuate nearly as much, but their overall levels throughout a president’s term resemble each other more and more. Nate Silver’s postage stamp plot of approval of various presidents captures this pretty well. Donald Trump is now almost exactly at the approval rating recorded at this time during his first term — and Joe Biden’s only term. The approvals recorded by the last three individuals to hold the office are much more stable than anything that came before.

From this point forward in Trump’s first term, his approval was effectively a flat line, moving up by a few points during the initial Covid emergency, declining during the chaotic months that followed, stabilizing before the 2020 election, and declining after January 6th. The major crises of 2020 and 2021 only merited shifts of a few points in presidential approval.

One other feature of modern approval ratings is that they largely follow the same trendline over a four year period. There’s an initial honeymoon period that fully wears off sometime late in the first year or early in the second year — and the trend is mostly flat from there on out. Only during presidential re-election years do you start to see a slight uptick in ratings, as more voters begin to align their approval with their vote intent. But otherwise, the trend is flat throughout the entirety of a presidential term. And across the Trump and Biden presidencies, approval seems to be anchored in the low 40s.

With stability like this, we need to stop looking for event-driven explanations for presidential job approval and start looking at the forces that shape these numbers across presidencies.

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🤖 If AI is like the Internet, it won’t cost jobs

My early career built on being the first in Republican politics to ride the wave of digital transformation. And “first” is hardly an exaggeration. In the late 1990s, I built political websites and a proto-blog completely for fun and love of the game. This eventually got noticed and led to early jobs at the RNC and the George W. Bush campaign in 2004, where I started out as one of just two staffers running email and the website. Back then, the number of people in the GOP with this mix of skills could be counted by finger on one hand. I didn’t feel any real competition in the field until the late aughts — more than a decade after I coded my first website in 1995. A few years later, employment in the digital field skyrocketed — with hundreds of staffers on presidential campaigns doing the work of a handful of us in 2004.

The current moment with AI feels like the takeoff moment the Internet had in the late 1990s an…

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↔️ Who do voters see as extreme—or in the middle?

The perceived ideology of politicians is always a fascinating question, with Donald Trump seen as more moderate than his Democratic rivals in each of his winning presidential campaigns. But recent YouGov data has Trump viewed as the most polarizing figure in America, with 50 percent calling him far-right, more than the 42 percent who call Bernie Sanders far-left.

Some interesting characteristics of this data beyond just the individual data points: First, party leaders pay an extremism penalty. They tend to be viewed as more extreme than if they were a backbencher with the same political positions. And second, the center is an exceptionally unstable place. Only a handful of politicians are genuinely perceived as centrists. And that’s usually because they’ve fallen dramatically out of favor with the bases of their own party (Liz Cheney, Andrew Cuomo), rendering them unable to win a primary election and thus electe…

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👫 Red state population boom

The latest Census population estimates are out, and they show a slowing down of population growth thanks to a fall in international migration — and a continuing shift of the population into states won by Donald Trump in the 2024 election.

At the state level, nineteen states lost population to domestic migration to other states, with California experiencing the biggest net loss — 229,077 people. With the crackdown at the border and stepped-up immigration enforcement, domestic migration is what’s increasingly deciding whether states will gain or lose House seats after the next decennial census in 2030.

Every state projected to lose House seats was a Biden state in 2020, while every state that would gain seats was a Trump state in 2024. If these reapportionment projections came to pass, Trump would have won by 9 more electoral votes in 2024 and would not have needed to win any of the “Blue Wall” states to win.

Lest we get too far out fro…

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🎂 One year of Trump 2.0

At the one year mark of presidential terms, you tend to get polls. Lots of them. And you’ll definitely get a New York Times/Siena poll.

The headline here is this chart from Nate Cohn (who should be the one doing the write-up for the print edition -ed.) showing most of the groups of the groups that swung hard towards Trump reverting back to their 2020 support levels — or worse.

Has Trump lost his coalition? That depends on how you define what the coalition is.

In 2016 and 2020, Trump realigned a lot of voters — white and nonwhite — who were better aligned with a populist and traditionalist vision of America but who previously voted Democratic. Those gains appear to be durable. If you want to compare 2026 to 2018, let’s compare demographic support levels in that election to this one as measured by the NYT/Siena poll, as Ryan Girdusky does in his excellent National Populist Newsletter:

• Democrats lead 18-29-year-olds by 27 points, down 22 poin…

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📈 Nate Silver’s latest pollster rankings are out

Echelon Insights once again scores in the top-tier of pollsters nationally in Nate Silver’s latest pollster ratings.

Lots of pollsters will tell you that accuracy is only a small piece of the puzzle. After all, if the point of polling is to help clients improve their position, you hope your clients will do better on Election Day than they do in your polls.

Nevertheless, we welcome the opportunity to be judged for whether we ultimately got it right. Even if polls are a snapshot in time, clients are much better off with an accurate snapshot than one that’s too optimistic or pessimistic.

And we’re particularly proud to have next to no bias — meaning we don’t systematically overestimate one side or the other.

Lots of pollsters and forecasters can become hot commodities by shading their numbers towards a certain outcome that then comes to pass in any given election. Statistically, polls and forecasts will tend to miss i…

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🇺🇲 Why “America First” doesn’t mean what you think it means

The rise of Donald Trump was supposed to represent a break from the hawkish foreign policy that has defined the Republican Party since the Reagan presidency. Trump’s criticism of the Iraq invasion in the 2016 primaries heralded a new populist era where the GOP’s old foreign policy wisdom was thrown by the wayside. Many neoconservatives seemed to think so: they were the first to exit the GOP after Trump’s ascendancy and prominently endorsed Trump’s opponents, most prominently the late former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, Liz.

And yet the first year of Trump 2.0 has been surprisingly Cheney-esque in its foreign policy: strikes on Yemen in the opening weeks of the administration, U.S. military strikes inside Iran, and now the capture of Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro.

Republicans have rallied behind the operation, with support among MAGA Republicans stronger than non-MAGA Republicans.

…

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This will be the last regular edition of The Intersection in 2025. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Holidays — and see you in 2026!

🇺🇲 Dems have fewer offensive opportunities than in 2018

One key difference between 2026 and the last Trump midterm in 2018 is that Democrats have fewer offensive opportunities to really run up the score in the House.

The reasons are a combination of mid-decade redistricting, the 2021-22 redistricting cycle where both sides drew themselves into safer seats, and the 2024 election where House Democrats ran ahead of Kamala Harris. While many Republicans were sitting in Clinton seats following the 2016 election, such low-hanging fruit is practically nonexistent this year.

There’s a Door A and Door B here. Door A is what we’ll call the “2022 scenario” in which Democrats poured massive resources into defending prime GOP pickup targets and largely succeeded in doing so. Republicans could do the same from a defensive position this …

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We’ve not heard much about this proposal since it was first made in March 2023. But with affordability showing no signs of going away as an issue, it’s time for the White House to dust off this bold Abundance-pilled vision to build the housing the country desperately needs. (And yes, this was the proposal that was paired with talk of flying cars.)

Many liberals this year have latched on to abundance as an organizing principle, bemoaning the failures of the left to build in the cities and states it controls. This criticism, which I heartily agree with, does have a certain honest quality of telling on yourself. Temperamentally, liberalism has hewed towards legalism and consensus. Unlike Trump, they’re not the people you expect to see taking bold action or big risks. At its core, this personality dif…

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😬 Democratic voters support democratic socialism 3-to-1

We asked self-identified Democrats about nine pressing issues in our recent omnibus survey month’s omnibus survey. While they sided with the moderate view on six of those issues, one view stands out: a 3-to-1 preference for “democratic socialism, where the government can be relied on to provide basic needs,” over “capitalism with sensible regulation.”

Note that it’s not just young Democrats either. Older Democrats supported this position by a net of 25 points, while their under-50 counterparts supported it by a staggering 67 points.

Even nominal support for capitalism is virtually nonexistent among younger Democrats.

🇮🇱 Young voters on Israel and antisemitism

While views more critical of Israel in the Gaza conflict are more common on the political left than the right, the Yale Youth Poll finds that distinctly antisemitic views are more common on the conservative fringe.

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🐘 The myth of the Trump-only voter

Readers will be shocked to learn that I think there’s a media narrative about recent elections that doesn’t get it exactly right.

This is the idea that Trump voters will only show up for Trump, and not for regular Republicans running in off-year elections.

I’ve covered the unfolding turnout problem for Republicans in depth. I wrote that the Virginia elections were consistent with 80% of Harris voters voting and 70% of Trump voters voting. In TN-7, I think this was 60% of Harris voters and between 45% and 50% of Trump voters — lower in the rurals, higher in the suburbs.

Turnout in deep-blue Nashville outpaced rural red areas in TN-7 — thanks to ChatGPT for making this chart off of a couple of screenshots of NYT election results

But this is also normal midterm turnout dynamics at play. The Virginia numbers were an exact mirror image of the 2021 turnout, where the pattern was almost exactly reversed from when it favored Republica…

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