Hurricane Ian

How Natural Disasters Can Change A Politician

By Maggie Koerth

Sep. 30, 2022, at 2:36 PM

In September 2017, Hurricane Irma swept across the southern tip of Florida, swamping what was then the state’s 26th Congressional District. The following July, that district’s Republican representative, Carlos Curbelo, introduced a bill that would tax greenhouse-gas emissions to help reduce the impact of climate change on his hurricane-prone constituency. Curbelo’s party affiliation raised eyebrows at the time, but for him, the threat of recurrent disasters sent political partisanship out the window. “This is not an academic discussion for those of us who live in South Florida. This is a local issue,” he told Audubon magazine in 2018.

And he’s not alone. Today, although some one-quarter of elected officials walking the halls of Congress don’t believe human-caused climate change is even real, research suggests that politicians can be persuaded to take action on climate change and other environmental issues. Unfortunately, it might take a headline-grabbing hurricane to do it. In the past decade, several studies have suggested that lawmakers are more likely to take action on climate change when they — and their constituents — have had to deal with the disastrous consequences of previously doing nothing. 

From the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire that led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency to the 1990 Oil Pollution Act that was born out of a series of oil spills, most notably from the Exxon Valdez, a long history of environmental disasters have inspired improvements in environmental policy, said M. Daniele Paserman, an economist at Boston University. 

“Disasters make environmental problems more salient,” he said. Paserman’s research has found that, between 1989 and 2014, congresspeople from districts hit by a hurricane were more likely to sponsor or co-sponsor environmental regulatory bills in the following year. And he’s not the only one who has noticed similar correlations. According to another study, which looked at abnormal temperature and precipitation trends between 2004 and 2011, members of Congress whose home states were experiencing weird weather were more likely to vote for all kinds of environmental legislation. More broadly, international research from 34 countries found that nuclear disasters increased the number of renewable-energy policies implemented for as long as seven years after the event. 

This line of research is relatively new and the number of studies relatively thin. But all of this builds on a larger question that has been studied more in depth: how personally experiencing the effects of climate change shape belief and behavior in the general public. 

A 2021 review of existing literature discovered ample evidence that living through a natural disaster is associated with higher levels of self-reported belief that climate change is a problem and a greater concern about what this might do to you and your family. Our own polling with Ipsos earlier this month showed something similar. Even among Republicans, nearly half of those who had experienced an extreme weather event in the past five years told us they were worried about climate change, compared with only 17 percent who hadn’t experienced a natural disaster.

But there are limits to the ability of a disaster to prevent future calamities. For one thing, the same review paper that showed increased belief in climate change didn’t find a corresponding increase in behaviors that would deal with that issue. And changes in belief are still heavily moderated by what people already think. For example, in a 2019 survey of people who experienced severe flooding in the United Kingdom during the winter of 2013-14, the ones who walked away with the highest levels of concern about climate change were those who had already attributed floods to global warming. 

So, it probably shouldn’t be a shock that the much smaller number of papers looking at how politicians might change their behavior in the face of climate change comes with its own set of caveats and complications. Studies have indicated that only countries with strong democracies see an increase in climate policy following climate disasters. And Paserman’s study found that the effects were tightly linked to proximity to the disaster. Even lawmakers who served in the same state where a hurricane occurred but whose districts were unaffected weren’t as likely to step up for political change. 

And while that paper found that politicians who experienced climate disasters were more likely to push for climate policies regardless of party, a different study — the one that showed abnormal temperature and precipitation trends were correlated with representatives’ environmental votes — found that party did matter. Moderate Democrats made the biggest shift toward more environmental-policy support, said Erich Muehlegger, an economist at the University of California, Davis, and an author on that paper. “We didn’t find much of a result for Republicans, nor did we find much of a result for the more strident Democrats, though that might be due to the fact that they were always voting for environmental regulations,” he said. “You can’t become more pro-environment if you were already on top of all those issues.” 

It’s going to take a lot more research to fully understand why politicians sometimes change their policy in the face of climate disaster and sometimes don’t. Meanwhile, just because lawmakers are responding to natural disasters with environmental votes doesn’t mean they aren’t seeing other, seedier kinds of legislative opportunities from the same event. Ethan Kaplan, an economist at University of Maryland, College Park, and his colleagues found that politicians are likely to use the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster to push through votes favoring the concerns of special-interest donors when nobody is paying attention. That’s not a contradiction to the idea that disaster could prompt politicians to take action on climate change. Instead, Kaplan said, the two things can run parallel. A disaster can create a distraction for donors’ goals in the short term, even as it prompts greater environmental policies in the long run. 

Election Update

5 Reasons For Democrats To Still Be Concerned About The Midterms

By Nate Silver

Sep. 30, 2022, at 11:38 AM

Last week, I argued that there weren’t yet clear signs of a Republican comeback in polls of the midterm elections.

This week? The case for a GOP rebound is a little better.

For one, Republicans can cite some individual polls that have been favorable for them. There was a poll this weekend from ABC News¹ and the Washington Post, which found Republicans 5 points ahead on the generic congressional ballot among likely voters — a result which would all but assure the GOP of winning the House and make the Senate an uphill battle for Democrats. Republican candidates have also pretty clearly gained ground in some individual Senate races, such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

There are counterexamples, though. Another highly rated pollster, Selzer & Co., published a poll this week showing Democrats 4 points ahead on the generic ballot among likely voters. Meanwhile, Democrats can cite a few strong recent Senate polls of their own in states such as Ohio and New Hampshire.

Overall, Democrats’ chances of winning the Senate are 68-in-100, according to the Deluxe version of our forecast. That’s down from a high of 71-in-100, which persisted from Sept. 13 to Sept. 20, though that change isn’t large in the big scheme of things. In the House, Democrats’ chances are 31-in-100, which reflects an even smaller change; their chances were 32-in-100 on Sept. 23 and 24.

Still, we’re overdue for a reminder of why Republicans still could do quite well for themselves in November. So here are five major reasons for hope for the GOP — and concern for Democrats. 

As an added twist, we’ll engage in a bit of model talk as we review these reasons. That is, I’ll tell you whether I think these reasons for hope/concern (depending on who you’re rooting for) are adequately accounted for by our model — or whether they reflect information outside of its scope and assumptions.

The fundamentals still ought to be pretty good for Republicans

Sure, this election could be an exception to the usual midterm pushback against the president’s party. But, it’s not always smart to bet on exceptions. So it’s worth going back over the reasons why I and other analysts initially expected this election to be a strong one for Republicans. 

• The opposition party — in this case, Republicans — has a long history of doing well in the midterms. It’s one of the more robust trends in American politics.
• Though his numbers have improved recently, President Biden remains fairly unpopular, with an approval rating of 42 percent.
• Americans remain quite unhappy about the direction of the country, which tends to hurt the incumbent party.
• Republicans have a big structural advantage in the Senate given that they do well with white, rural voters and that white rural voters are considerably overrepresented in the Senate relative to their overall share of the U.S. population.

Does the FiveThirtyEight model account for this? Yes. The Classic and Deluxe versions of our model use a blend of polls and fundamentals when evaluating the overall political environment and individual races.²

This makes a pretty big difference in the House, where our Lite forecast, which tries to predict the race based on polls alone, gives Republicans a 61-in-100 chance of a House takeover. Those odds jump to 68-in-100 percent in the Deluxe forecast, which takes fundamentals into account. This also boosts the odds of Republicans, who have a 23-in-100 chance of winning the Senate in Lite but a 32-in-100 chance in Deluxe.

The differences between the forecasts were larger at earlier points in the cycle; there isn’t as much time left now for the polls to converge toward the fundamentals. Still, the model assumes that Republicans are more likely to gain ground than to lose ground in the polls between now and November.

The “issue environment” could get better for Republicans

This is the argument recently advanced by Nate Cohn of The New York Times. During the summer, Democrats benefited from media and voter attention to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Jan. 6 hearings, and the FBI investigation of former President Donald Trump. These issues tend to remind voters of Republican power and influence and potentially make the election more of a 2020-like choice between Democrats and Republicans and less of a referendum on Biden and Democrats’ performance.

But now, issues like immigration and the economy are again getting more headlines. That’s not to say abortion and those other issues won’t matter, but the summer could have reflected a best-case scenario for Democrats.

Does the FiveThirtyEight model account for this? Not exactly. The model accounts for uncertainty due to future news events. But it doesn’t make any assumptions about whether these surprises tend to benefit one party over another.

But … I’d be careful overthinking this. People who cover politics for a living, including me, live in a bubble full of people who pay far more attention to day-to-day political developments than regular voters do. Pundits’ guesses about which stories voters will care about, or how they will affect their voting preferences, are often wrong. Moreover, the life cycle of stories tends to be pretty short. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s decision to send immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard was a huge story until about a week ago, but now we have a devastating hurricane and a new wave of economic concerns that have usurped it. So in practice, assuming that future news events create uncertainty in both directions will usually be the best course.

Republicans could overtake Democrats in advertising

If I were actually betting on election outcomes at prediction markets — and no, I don’t do that for a variety of reasons! — I’d pay attention to the flow of campaign advertising. Advertising may not matter that much in terms of moving votes in an era with relatively few swing voters. But it certainly matters some, and the effects can be short-lived. So if one candidate had a temporary edge on their airwaves, it might lead to a temporary surge in the polls, which would then recede.

So one potential source of concern for Democrats would be if they’d dominated the advertising race during the summer, but only temporarily.

Is this happening? I honestly don’t know. There are some accounts of Republican groups having boosted spending recently. But while public fundraising and campaign spending is relatively easy to track, outside spending also plays a large role and is more opaque. Moreover, outside spending has tended to favor conservatives and Republicans this cycle. With that said, not every dollar is spent equally well. Outside groups don’t get the same favorable advertising rates that campaigns themselves do, and it’s cheaper to buy ads in advance rather than at the last minute.

Does the FiveThirtyEight model account for this? Not really. The model doesn’t make any assumptions at all about advertising. It doesn’t discount or adjust a poll because it came during an advertising blitz, for example. Nor does it make any assumption about future advertising spend. The model does account for fundraising; money raised from individual donors is one of the factors that the model evaluates in addition to the polls. But this is more because fundraising tends to be a proxy for grassroots support rather than because of any additional advertising leverage it provides.

Republicans are more likely than not to have an enthusiasm advantage

One reason that the aforementioned ABC News poll was so worrying for Democrats is because of the relatively large enthusiasm differential it showed between registered voters — among whom Democrats trailed on the generic ballot by only 1 percentage point — and likely voters, among whom they trailed by 5. That 4-point “enthusiasm gap” was somewhat reminiscent of the 2010 midterms, when there was roughly a 6-point gap between polls of registered and likely voters, leading to a catastrophic election for Democrats.

But other polls do not show the same enthusiasm disadvantage for Democrats. As Cohn mentions, for instance, there was only a 1-point enthusiasm gap in The New York Times’s recent generic ballot polling. Other polls in the wake of the Dobbs decision found that while Republicans were more excited than usual to vote at the midterms, so were Democrats. Democrats have also tended to have strong turnout in recent special elections and ballot referendums. The consensus of the evidence points toward a modest enthusiasm gap favoring Republicans — enough to make matters harder for Democrats, especially in the House — but nothing like the magnitude of 2010.

Does the FiveThirtyEight model account for this? Yes, the model explicitly accounts for the likely GOP enthusiasm advantage. Specifically, it adjusts polls of registered voters to make them equivalent to polls of likely voters.

Initially, this adjustment is based on historical patterns: Republican voters have historically been more likely to turn out than Democratic ones, and voters of the opposition party are more likely to turn out than voters from the president’s party.³ In 2018, those factors offset one another (Republicans had the traditional enthusiasm advantage, but Democrats were the opposition party). But this year, they’re both working in the GOP’s favor.

I can also see an argument that this assumption is too generous to Republicans, though. Voters at the midterms tend to be older, whiter and more well-educated than voters in presidential years. Historically, these factors all tended to favor Republicans. Now, however — while Republicans are still older and whiter — Democrats tend to dominate among college-educated voters, who are considerably more likely to turn out to vote.

There’s still some reason for Democrats to be concerned about the reliability of the polls

Let me put this carefully. Two weeks ago, I wrote about why I don’t agree with the presumption that polls — despite their shortcomings in 2016 and 2020 — are biased toward Democrats:

Here, I’m going to present something of a rebuttal […] to the presumption I often see in discussion about polling that polling bias is predictable and necessarily favors Democrats. My contention is that while the polls could have another bad year, it’s hard to know right now whether that bias will benefit Democrats or Republicans. People’s guesses about this are often wrong. In 2014, for example, there was a lot of discussion about whether the polls would have a pro-Republican bias, as they did in 2012. But they turned out to have a pro-Democratic bias instead.

There are a lot of qualifications here. It doesn’t mean that the polls can’t have a bad year. But the idea behind the FiveThirtyEight model is that they’ll be biased toward Democrats in some years, they’ll be biased toward Republicans in some years, and they’ll be unbiased in some years — and it’s hard to know what you’re getting ahead of time.

I’ve read various rebuttals to this article, some of which I find a little lacking. For instance, I simply don’t think it’s correct to claim, as Andrew Prokop recently did in Vox, that polls overestimated Democratic performance in 2018.⁴ To treat anti-Republican bias in the polls as a sort of inescapable empirical regularity based on a sample of two election cycles, neither of which was the most recent midterm, is making too much of limited evidence.

But does that mean I give no credence at all to what we might call the Predictable Democratic Polling Bias (PDPB) hypothesis? No, of course not. Good fox-like forecasters can hold multiple ideas or hypotheses in their head at once. PDPB has some things going for it. My mental model of the race might be something like: mostly the FiveThirtyEight forecast, but with a little smidge of weight that PDPB is real.

What’s the case for PDPB? Again, I don’t think it’s an empirical one. Empirically, the evidence strongly shows that polling bias is unpredictable.

But the theoretical case that analyst Richard Hanania makes for PDPB in his recent Substack post is plausible. If, fundamentally, Republicans are less likely to answer surveys because (for instance) they have lower social trust, that’s not necessarily an intractable problem. But it could be one that hasn’t been addressed yet. It could take pollsters a couple of election cycles to work out the right approach, especially if it requires abandoning traditional polling best practices.

Interestingly enough, PDPB wouldn’t necessarily doom Democrats in the Senate. Even if polls had a 3-point pro-Democratic bias, Democrat John Fetterman would still be favored in Pennsylvania, where he leads by 6 points in our polling average. Democratic incumbents Raphael Warnock in Georgia and Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada would technically be underdogs (they currently lead by 2.1 and 0.7 percentage points, respectively). But Georgia and Nevada have had fairly accurate polling in recent years. Any amount of PDPB would doom Democrats’ chances in the House, however.

Does the FiveThirtyEight model account for this? Sort of.

Although the model doesn’t assume any sort of permanent polling bias, it does give some weight to the fundamentals, and as I mentioned above, the fundamentals are more favorable to Republicans than the polls alone. The Deluxe forecast also considers expert ratings, and although how it uses these ratings is slightly complicated (read the methodology section for more), those do help Republican odds in the Senate.

Perhaps if you give a little bit of extra mental weight to PDPB, it would be enough to account for the relatively small differences between the FiveThirtyEight forecast and betting markets. For instance, betting markets give Republicans a 39 percent chance of winning Senate control, as compared to 31 percent in our Deluxe forecast, and a 75 percent chance of House control, instead of 68 percent. Those are small enough differences that I’m not sure I’d make huge bets on either side.

Iran

Iranians Are Ready For A Different Approach to Religion and Government

By Zoha Qamar

Sep. 30, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

Protests in Iran have been raging on for nearly two weeks because 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in the custody of the “morality police” after she allegedly failed to comply with the nation’s veiling laws. The protests that began on the streets of Saqqez, her hometown, have now spread to roughly 80 cities across the nation, as Iranian women lead demonstrations in defiance of a law that mandates they cover their hair and wear loose-fitting clothes while in public. At least 76 people have died, although the toll is likely higher as internet restrictions have made information harder to confirm.

Amini’s death may have sparked this recent uprising, but data shows Iranian opposition toward required veiling isn’t new. The Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran, a Netherlands-based research foundation, conducted a comprehensive study in 2020 on Iranians’ opinions about religion and found that a whopping 72 percent of literate Iranians over age 19¹ disagreed with the government mandating that women wear the hijab in public, compared with only 15 percent who agreed with it. Over the years, those who have subverted the law have faced violent beatings and, in the case of Amini, fatal consequences at the hands of the government. 

These events have brought a simmering question to a boil: In a world increasingly secular and interconnected, what role do people think theology should play in determining law? 

While Iran is now associated with mandatory veiling, that was not always the case. In 1936, the penultimate shah of Iran, Reza Shah Pahlavi, decreed a ban on hijab in an attempt to promote European attire. Women who failed to comply with this prior law similarly faced punishments, such as imprisonment. The newer mandate, which Iranians are protesting now, was implemented when the pro-Western, secular monarchy was replaced with an Islamic theocracy after the 1979 revolution.

First, the veil was banned, and now it’s mandatory. But once again, most Iranians are proponents of change — not just for hijab law but also for the role of religion in government more broadly. Only 22 percent of literate Iranians over age 19² believe an Islamic republic is the most suitable governing structure for their country, according to a survey by GAMAAN conducted in February. Meanwhile, in a separate question, 88 percent agreed that having a democratic system would be a good idea. 

Also in that study, two-thirds said they did not want a government run according to religious law, which challenges the inherent premise of the country’s current governing structure. In contrast, according to a 2020 Pew Research Center study, half of all Americans thought the Bible should have at least some bearing on the law, despite this nation’s principles separating church and state. 

In the decades since its 1979 revolution, Iran has faced its fair share of political uprisings — due to claims of rigged elections and soaring gas prices, for example. But this current political moment has uniquely united Iranian women across socioeconomic, ethnic and regional lines. Furthermore, the recent demonstrations are not simply a protest of the current ruling politicians but also one that challenges how religion underpins the law overall.

Outside of Iran, however, the global trend has been toward repression of religion in the public sphere. Pew has tracked government limitations on religion since 2007. According to data published in 2021, Pew found that the global level of politically affiliated religious restriction was higher than it had been for most of the prior decade. Meanwhile, the history of Iran shows that both forced and forbidden faith can lead to dangerous consequences for citizens.

The ongoing internet shutdowns will likely keep international eyes from seeing everything happening in Iran, including the government’s violence toward those speaking up. But quashing protests will not necessarily mean quashing dissent. Although Ali Khamenei, Iran’s current supreme leader, has long posited outside influences, especially the U.S., as the greatest threat to his rule, this moment suggests that Iran’s own citizens — and its women in particular — could present a huge challenge to the power of theocracy.

Other polling bites

• The share of Democrats who believe President Biden should run for office again has ticked up slightly over the past two months, per recent polling from Morning Consult/Politico. Fifty-nine percent of Democratic voters said they’d support his reelection campaign in a Sept. 23-25 survey, up from 51 percent in early July and 53 percent in early August. In the case that he does not run, however, a plurality of Democratic voters (28 percent) said they would support Vice President Kamala Harris instead, followed by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (13 percent). 

• In light of Hurricane Ian, the Jan. 6 House Select Committee postponed its ninth hearing, which was scheduled for Sept. 28 and would have been the first since July. Though a new date has yet to be announced, 58 percent of Americans support resuming the hearings following those in the summer, according to a poll from Monmouth University conducted Sept. 21-25. Unsurprisingly, that number reveals a highly partisan divide: 83 percent of Democrats reported wanting the hearings to continue, but only 31 percent of Republicans agreed. And while 62 percent of Democrats said the hearings should carry on as long as necessary, 75 percent of Republicans said the investigation should conclude as soon as possible. 

• On the heels of President Vladimir Putin granting Russian citizenship to former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, a Sept. 28 YouGov survey asked Americans about his notorious 2013 leak of top-secret information on government surveillance. Thirty-nine percent said Snowden’s actions constituted “the right thing to do.” Additional polling found that almost 6 in 10 Americans think it is “somewhat” (29 percent) or “very” (29 percent) common that the U.S. government surveils ordinary citizens who aren’t suspected of committing a crime. Nonetheless, a third question showed that only around a quarter of Americans (27 percent) take any precautions to avoid surveillance of their personal devices, although that number varies by age: While only 19 percent of adults 65 or over say they take such precautions, that share increases to 35 percent among those under 30. 

• Overall, just 26 percent of Americans are at least somewhat interested in learning more about the metaverse, but according to polling from Morning Consult conducted Aug. 24-25, that share rises to 63 percent among moviegoers who frequent theaters at least three times a month. That’s even more than gamers (55 percent), sports betters (50 percent) or those with five or more streaming subscriptions (40 percent). Those moviegoers were also much more likely than Americans in general to report having read, heard or seen mentions of the metaverse.

Biden approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker,³ 42.0 percent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president, while 52.2 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -10.2 points). At this time last week, 42.5 percent approved and 53.0 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of -10.5 points). One month ago, Biden had an approval rating of 42.4 percent and a disapproval rating of 53.4 percent, for a net approval rating of -11.0 points.

Generic ballot

In our average of polls of the generic congressional ballot,⁴ Democrats currently lead Republicans by 1.3 points (45.3 percent to 44.1 percent). A week ago, Democrats led by 1.9 points (45.2 percent to 43.3 percent). At this time last month, voters preferred Democrats by 0.5 points (44.3 percent to 43.8 percent).

According to the FiveThirtyEight midterm forecast, Republicans have a 69 percent chance of winning back the House, while Democrats have a 68 percent chance of keeping control of the Senate, although there has been some movement behind those topline numbers.

In this installment of “Model Talk” on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Nate Silver and Galen Druke discuss how polling could change before the midterms, including the shift from registered voters to likely voters, and whether the generic ballot could continue favoring Democrats. They also answer some listener questions, including what’s going on in the Alaska Senate election and how much candidate quality actually matters.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Hurricanes

How Waffle House Helps Us Respond To Hurricanes

After a hurricane, the 24/7 restaurant provides one measure of how infrastructure and supply chains are holding up.

By Maryn McKenna

Sep. 29, 2022, at 1:36 PM

This 2016 story followed a team of Waffle House operations analysts as they decided whether to close any of the chain’s locations in preparation for Hurricane Matthew, a Category 5 storm that ended up affecting the Florida coast as a Category 2 storm. This week, as at least 21 Waffle House locations in Florida closed due to Hurricane Ian, we thought we should revisit what happens when the famously resilient restaurant shuts its doors for a storm — and why even the federal government pays attention when it does. 

On a warm, cloudy morning in the first week of October, in an anonymous office park just outside Atlanta, operations analyst Matt Stark opened a computer program, ran through some data and looked thoughtfully at the results.

Out in the Atlantic Ocean, Hurricane Matthew was hurling winds of 115 miles an hour toward the coast of Florida. Hundreds of miles inland, in the headquarters of Waffle House Inc., Stark’s software predicted that 477 of the chain’s almost 1,900 restaurants might be affected by the onrushing storm.

This meant two things. First, as the storm made landfall, some locations of Waffle House — which boasts that every restaurant stays open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year — would probably have to close because of power loss or concerns for workers’ safety. And second, sometime after they did, someone would invoke the “Waffle House Index,” the slightly flippant measure of how bad a storm can get.

And Matthew brought on both those expected scenarios. Waffle House announced Oct. 6 that it was pre-emptively closing some restaurants on a 90-mile stretch of Interstate 95 between Fort Pierce and Titusville in Florida. (In the next few days, as the storm churned up the coast and flooded North Carolina, it would close 98 all told.) And as soon as the announcement went out, media tracking the storm, and customers on social media, invoked the closings as a sign of the apocalypse.

The Miami Herald: “When Waffle House surrenders to a hurricane, you know it’s bad.” The Washington Post: “Hurricane Matthew is so scary even the always-open eatery is evacuating.” A faithful customer on Twitter: “GOD IN HEAVEN THIS IS THE END!”

In those areas, the Waffle House Index had just gone to red.

Disaster responders pay attention to that index, which was created — in the midst of 2004’s devastating Hurricane Charley — by W. Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency since 2009. Fugate was director of emergency management for Florida when Charley slammed the state with unexpected force: Its winds strengthened abruptly and it went from a Category 2 to a Category 4, and the storm suddenly changed direction and struck the state’s Gulf Coast at Sanibel, 150 miles south of its predicted landfall. Tens of thousands of people were reportedly left homeless.

Fugate was in his office with state meteorologist Ben Nelson and members of the Florida National Guard, color-coding infrastructure loss on a map — green for operating, yellow for affected, and red for destroyed — and the group decided to take a look at some of the damage, and try to find a meal.

“They went to a Waffle House and noticed they had a limited menu, with nonperishable items,” Alexa Lopez, FEMA’s press secretary, told me. “The next day, they were driving around and they went to a different Waffle House, and the same thing happened, a limited menu.”

So, she said, the group was inspired first to rank Waffle Houses in the same way: green for fully operational, yellow for a limited menu and red for closed. “Which is pretty bad, because Waffle House is always open,” Lopez added. And, second, to use those observations as a proxy for how much a disaster disrupts a community. Fugate has since been quoted as saying: “If you get there and the Waffle House is closed? That’s really bad. That’s where you go to work.”

The concept of restaurant operations as an indicator of storm impact percolated slowly into emergency-management culture — the magazine Environment Health Safety Today wrote about it in July 2011 — and broke out into the open around the time of Hurricane Irene in August 2011 (when, according to The Wall Street Journal, 22 Waffle Houses lost power but only one stayed closed longer than a day).

But the so-called index isn’t actually an official metric. FEMA doesn’t publish it anywhere; no one, except for Waffle House itself, counts how many restaurants are running lean or forced to close. But the company does give that count to the agency, and FEMA uses it — along with wind speeds and power outages and other objective measures — to judge a storm’s impact, and to figure out where its own crews and other emergency responders can get fed.

So far, so obvious: If a storm is bad enough to close restaurants that “never close,” we can agree that storm is bad. Hurricane Matthew was the strongest storm of the 2016 Atlantic hurricane season, which ended Nov. 30.

But the Waffle House Index also stands for something less obvious. It is an indicator of how complex and long supply chains are — for food, for fuel, for power — and of what it takes to plan around infrastructure that can be fragile in unexpected ways.

“The essence of the index is not just that the situation is bad,” Panos Kouvelis, director of the Boeing Center for Supply Chain Innovation at Washington University in St. Louis, told me. “Companies like Waffle House, and Wal-Mart and Home Depot, operate in areas that are frequently hit by disasters, where their operations may go down at the same time the demand for their services go up. So they have had to develop very well-defined playbooks for being prepared.”

But preparation is a complicated endeavor in an economy where few things are sold in the places where they were made. Vanilla comes from Madagascar. The United States imports most of its salt. The plywood needed to protect windows from storm debris might have been manufactured in China, and a storm in the Gulf of Mexico can force enough interruption on petroleum refining to choke off supply on the other side of the country.

“When I talk to companies about whether they understand their supply chains, they generally know one step up and back: who they buy from and who they sell to,” said Amy Kircher, director of the Food Protection and Defense Institute at the University of Minnesota. “They don’t understand that there are five or 10 steps in the chain before the product reaches them. Or that the alternate suppliers they consider their contingency plan are all buying from the same place.”

At Waffle House headquarters in November, Stark and his colleagues on the chain’s storm team — Vice Presidents Pat Warner and Will Mizell and Communications Director Kelly Thrasher-Bruner, who handles social media in disasters — walked me through how they prepare. As we talked, Stark pulled up an updated post-Matthew map. Of 200 restaurants that ended up in the storm’s path, just one, in inland North Carolina, gleamed red, for “still affected”; it had been flooded and needed cleaning out.

“It’s a big deal for us to shut down, because we’re not used to turning everything off and turning the lights off and closing the door,” said Warner, who estimates that he has worked “more than 10” hurricane responses in 17 years. “So our goal is to open up as quickly as possible afterward. The operations team works with the distributor to get food ready to go in. The construction team lines up generators. If you have generators you have to have fuel, so we line up that.”

On the edge of the predicted storm zone — which Stark monitors from a temporary “war room” assembled by putting mobile giant screens in a conference room — the company positions personnel who can swoop in: carpenters, electricians, IT specialists, a food-safety expert and someone to talk to local governments and law enforcement and soothe concerns about curfews. A little farther out, restaurants in other markets line up “jump teams”: spare personnel who volunteer to work in place of locals who might have evacuated or might need to repair their homes or care for family. In Hurricane Matthew, the company sent in an extra 250 people.

“We say we throw chaos at chaos,” Mizell said. “We just throw a lot of resources down there to get restaurants open. Our CEO will be there. In Matthew, our chairman was there, too.”

Before the carpenters and computer specialists or the replacement cooks and servers arrive, the company assesses how long it has been since supplies were delivered and — just as crucial — how long since the local trash removal company last emptied the dumpster. “Most restaurants get a delivery once a week,” Stark said. “If it got there Wednesday and the storm hits Thursday, they should have enough food, but if the storm hits Tuesday, we may have to hurry up and get some food there.”

Waffle House uses one main distributor, Illinois-based US Foods, which has depots scattered across the Southeast, where most Waffle Houses are concentrated, and where many hurricanes that strike the U.S. make landfall. So supplies don’t need to travel far in advance of a storm and are close by once roads are clear.

That model of staging supplies and personnel in layers outside an emergency, in order to swoop in quickly once it abates, isn’t unique to Waffle House. It’s also followed by the military and by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which oversees the Strategic National Stockpile of emergency medications, vaccines and antidotes for natural disasters and biological attacks.

“We think about, What are the timelines in which people have to be provided medications?” Greg Burel, the stockpile’s director, told me. “Our primary stock is laid down in undisclosed locations around the country that give us access to large swaths of the population and that are accessible” by more than one type of transportation.

But the CDC also puts smaller, lighter assets — the equivalent of a temporary field hospital or a stash of medications that could be deployed immediately — “as far forward as we can if we have advance notice, but not so far forward that it becomes victim to that event,” Burel said.

The first rule of operating in a disaster, though, is keeping personnel safe. Every Waffle House employee gets a key fob with lists of relevant phone numbers. Local managers keep track of who has challenging home situations — disabled parents, children with special needs, single heads of household — and might need extra help. Every location has a wall-mounted “crisis response” flier that includes detachable wallet cards listing personal-preparedness steps for hurricanes, tornadoes and ice storms.

The cards also remind employees how needed they will be at work. “We will be very busy,” the current hurricane-preparedness card says, “and you will make lots of money!”

Once employees arrive or return and a location can open, they work through the storm manual: a giant binder, a kind of choose-your-own-adventure game composed in eggs and grits. “Here’s how you run the restaurant if you’re without power, without gas for the grills, without water,” Mizell said. “We can cook on the grills even if we don’t have electricity. We can bring in bottled water and canned Coke products and serve on to-go plates. We can get porta-potties.”

The storm team examines what worked and didn’t after every disaster, each time learning new lessons. In Hurricane Katrina — when they closed 107 locations in Mississippi and on the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain — roads were so bad they stashed supplies in a refrigerated semi-trailer with armed guards, and fuel so scarce they brought in their own tank trucks. When Katrina struck in 2005, Twitter had not yet launched; now Bruner uses it not just to alert customers to closings, but to crowdsource whether roads are open and where the power is on.

Waffle House began working on storm response before Katrina — Warner said he thinks the first organized attempt was Hurricane Hugo, which hit Charleston, South Carolina, in September 1989 — but from then to now, the company’s biggest need in disasters hasn’t changed.

“People,” Warner said. “We can get the food there, by hook or by crook. It costs more, but we’re willing to spend it. But if we don’t have people, we can’t open up.”

2022 Election

Democrats Need More Than Beto O’Rourke If They Want To Flip Texas

By Alex Samuels

Sep. 29, 2022, at 10:10 AM

Once again, everyone can’t stop talking about Beto O’Rourke.

FiveThirtyEight’s polling average¹ shows a single-digit contest in the Texas gubernatorial race between O’Rourke and the Republican incumbent, Greg Abbott. Earlier this year, O’Rourke made headlines for his record-breaking fundraising, and the fallout from a succession of high-profile events in the state — the triggering of a preexisting state law banning abortions, continued strains on the power grid and a mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history — are giving him unexpected leverage against Abbott. As a result, this gubernatorial election could be one of Texas’s most competitive since Democrats last held the office in the 1990s.

Let’s be real about one thing, though: The overall electoral environment might be improving for Democrats, but O’Rourke is still a serious long shot. FiveThirtyEight’s 2022 midterm-election forecast² gives Abbott a 95-in-100 chance of besting his ubiquitous Democratic challenger. But is it possible that after his closer-than-expected Senate race against Ted Cruz in 2018 and rise to national prominence after a nearly eight-month campaign in the 2020 presidential election, a narrow loss against Abbott in November could be a victory for Texas Democrats in the long run?

The idea that O’Rourke could be laying the groundwork for future Democratic victories in Texas isn’t a crazy one. After all, other Southern states like Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina have become somewhat more competitive over the past several election cycles. But another close statewide race for O’Rourke this year doesn’t necessarily mean Texas is on the verge of turning blue — or even purple. That’s because O’Rourke is, well, O’Rourke, and without a stronger campaign infrastructure throughout the state, it will be hard for most Texas Democrats running in statewide elections to replicate his level of fundraising and fanfare. And, fundamentally, Texas is still a red-leaning state.

O’Rourke’s campaign style is hard to emulate because, for one, he’s become a buzzy celebrity candidate since his 2018 race, and he has a gift for making headlines. When he’s not standing up to hecklers at campaign events or interrupting Abbott at a news conference in Uvalde, where 19 students and two teachers died in a mass shooting, O’Rourke has made a name for himself by zig-zagging his Toyota Tundra across the state, snapping selfies with voters and dropping f-bombs to fire up his base.

As the chart below shows, public curiosity about O’Rourke has waned since his 2020 run, according to Google Trends data, but he’s still able to draw national attention.

But politicians can only get so far on personality alone — and O’Rourke is no exception. That doesn’t mean he isn’t a strong candidate, though. A poll fielded in late August and early September by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin gave Abbott only a 5-percentage-point edge over O’Rourke. And another, more recent, poll from Quinnipiac University conducted in late September gave Abbott a slightly larger, 7-point edge.

Still, it’s unlikely that O’Rourke will be able to build a lasting campaign infrastructure for future Texas Democrats to replicate if they want to run statewide. That’s because of one major problem: an apparent lack of organization among the Democratic Party in Texas. To build on O’Rourke’s 2018 — and likely 2022 — margins against incumbent Republicans, the party would need to build and sustain a solid campaign infrastructure well past this year’s midterm elections.

“One of the issues for Democrats here is that there’s been a lot of turnover in their candidate pool,” said James Henson, the executive director of the Texas Politics Project. “To me, that’s a pretty big indicator that there’s not really an established, institutional foundation in the Democratic Party here in the way that you do see it on the Republican side.”

In addition to issues with recruitment and turnover facing Democrats running in marquee Texas races — save for O’Rourke and former oil executive Mike Collier, who is challenging Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick again after losing to him by 5 points in 2018 — the party has run inexperienced candidates against formidable Republicans and doesn’t have a presence in a sizable chunk of the state. Case in point: Over 50 of Texas’s 254 counties have no organized county party or leaders, according to the state Democratic Party’s website. A notable number of those counties are in rural parts of the state too, and even in 2018, O’Rourke won the support of only 24 percent of the voters living in Texas’s 186 rural³ counties, according to The Texas Tribune. Cruz, in contrast, won over 75 percent of the vote there.

Moreover, Henson told me, there’s no obvious successor who can build off — and improve upon — the infrastructure that O’Rourke’s campaign has created. “In the past, there were times when successful campaigns, at least indirectly, provided people with a model for organizing and professional skills,” Henson said. “But that’s just not happening here in Texas.” In 2018, O’Rourke’s close contest against Cruz helped Democrats Lizzie Fletcher of Houston and Colin Allred of Dallas flip two congressional districts by each unseating a long-term Republican incumbent. Democrats had a net gain of 12 seats in the Texas House as well. But then, in 2020, Texas Democrats fell short of their electoral goals.

There are other reasons, though, why a close win for O’Rourke doesn’t necessarily speak to Democrats’ political future in Texas. For one, the Republican Party’s brand is still strong in Texas. When it comes to key policy issues, polling suggests that voters still overwhelmingly trust Republicans over Democrats. The August-September Texas Politics Project survey, for example, showed that voters were more likely to trust Abbott over O’Rourke on handling issues like the U.S.-Mexico border situation and the economy. Voters trusted O’Rourke more on abortion, however.

Yet while voters were divided over who could better handle gun violence, Texans said the top issues facing the state were border security, immigration, political corruption/leadership and inflation/rising prices — abortion and gun control/gun violence were further down their list. That means that any Democrat running after O’Rourke would need to win voters’ trust on these issues — and that’s a tall order given that even O’Rourke has had only limited success.

On top of that, demographic changes in Texas that at one point may have been viewed as good news for Democrats might not end up working in their favor. The state’s Hispanic population is growing, but demographics are not destiny in American politics — and those voters might be a hard bloc for Democrats to make further gains with, especially after Texas’s border counties moved sharply to the right in 2020. Voters in other rural parts of the state have also been hard for Democrats to win, and despite O’Rourke’s campaigning in rural counties, it’s not clear whether even he is making significant inroads.

And so far, O’Rourke hasn’t necessarily provided a foolproof model for winning over Republican and independent voters, whose support he’d need to beat Abbott in what is still a red-leaning state. O’Rourke might be a major presence in Texas, but he’s not actually that popular. A September poll from the University of Texas at Tyler for The Dallas Morning News, for instance, found that almost half of the state’s registered voters — 47 percent — had a somewhat or very unfavorable opinion of O’Rourke compared with 40 percent who viewed him in a positive light. He didn’t fare well with independent voters, either: 46 percent had an unfavorable view of O’Rourke versus 34 percent who had a favorable opinion.

The survey didn’t ask respondents to assess Abbott’s favorability, but exactly half of voters said they strongly or somewhat approved of his job performance as governor; meanwhile, 47 percent said they disapproved. Those numbers have given O’Rourke’s opponents an opportunity, too. Since his presidential campaign, he has given Republicans a useful foil to inspire their own turnout.

In short, for Texas Democrats to succeed statewide, they’d need to have a healthy mixture of O’Rourke’s popularity, an appeal to a wider swath of voters and, ideally, not be a bogeyman or bogey(wo)man for Republicans. That’s a big ask in a state that hasn’t fielded especially strong Democratic candidates beyond O’Rourke in the past few statewide election cycles. 

Of course, because the Democratic candidate is O’Rourke — a micro-celebrity in the state and nationwide — the race could be close. That said, his race likely won’t say much about Texas Democrats’ larger ambitions to flip the state because there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done before they get there.

2022 Election

Two Election Deniers Are Facing Very Different Odds In Arizona

By Kaleigh Rogers

Sep. 29, 2022, at 10:00 AM

There are election deniers, and then there’s Kari Lake. While 201 Republican nominees¹ have fully denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election, few have made claims of fraud as central to their campaign as Lake, the Republican nominee for Arizona governor. A darling among former President Donald Trump’s endorsees, Lake has repeated his unfounded claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” and spread baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud. And she looks well-positioned to take on her Democratic opponent, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, as it’s currently a toss-up with Hobbs at 52 percent to Lake’s 48 percent, according to our midterm forecast.²

So why then, in another statewide race in this purple state, is a fellow Trump-endorsed election denier facing tougher odds? Blake Masters, the Republican nominee for Senate, has just a 17-in-100 chance of winning against incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, according to FiveThirtyEight’s Senate forecast. Like Lake, Masters has claimed Trump “won in 2020,” and said he wouldn’t have accepted the results if he were in office at the time. 

Of course, these races are about more than election denialism. While 2020 has cast a long shadow over many campaigns, most voters in the state are more concerned with issues like inflation and abortion than election fraud. And even when it comes to election denial, there is some daylight between Lake and Masters’s positions. Still, these candidates have a lot of similarities, at least on paper, so why is one in a toss-up and the other struggling to keep up? 

Let’s stress test a few theories of where these two candidates are similar — and where they differ — to see if we can unravel the mystery of Blake and Lake. 

Different races, different opponents

One possible explanation is simply that Lake and Masters are squaring off against different opponents. Kelly has a couple of advantages that Hobbs doesn’t. For one, Kelly is an incumbent, and a popular one — in a September survey of likely Arizona voters by AARP/Fabrizio Ward and Impact Research, the senator had a 50 percent approval rating, including a 14 percent approval rating among Republicans (as far as cross-party approval goes, that’s pretty good). As a former astronaut and the husband of former Rep. Gabby Giffords, he has a lot of name recognition and a healthy amount of public goodwill. 

Meanwhile, Hobbs has been unavoidably at the center of the election denial issue. As secretary of state, Hobbs was responsible for administering the 2020 election and certifying the results, making her persona non grata for voters who baselessly believe that the election was fraudulent. Hobbs was also embroiled in an actual scandal last year over the prior firing of a staffer while she was in the state Senate. And Hobbs has refused to debate Lake, a move that has given her opponent plenty of fuel for attacks while preventing voters from seeing the two candidates square off head-to-head (though they will both be participating in a town hall forum next week). Combined, these factors show Hobbs as a weaker opponent than Kelly.

But FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages suggest that’s not the sole explanation for the differences in these two races. The polls show Masters struggling to keep up with Kelly, while Lake is giving Hobbs a run for her money. But if you look at total vote shares, it’s clear that the biggest difference is not between Kelly and Hobbs — it’s between Lake and Masters. Kelly, Hobbs and Lake are all within spitting distance of each other: Kelly has 49 percent support, Hobbs 47 percent, and Lake is right on Hobbs’s tail with 46 percent. But Masters is the odd one out with only 42 percent support, showing that in these races, the biggest gulf is between the GOP candidates, not their opponents.

Mo’ money, no problems?

If their respective opponents aren’t to blame for the discrepancy between Lake and Masters, maybe their bank accounts are. While never a guarantee of a win, a well-funded campaign can sometimes explain the difference in a close race. In the governor’s race, the most recent state election filings show Lake has brought in $3.8 million and spent $3.6 million, while Hobbs has outraised her only marginally, bringing in $4.4 million and spending $3.9 million. In the Senate race, Masters has raised just over $5 million. But Kelly. Oh, Kelly. He has one of the highest-funded election campaigns in the country, having raised over $54 million as of July, spending over $30 million, so it’s almost certainly even higher as we head into the midterms. 

So it certainly seems like we found our outlier, but as I mentioned above, the starkest differences in the polls are between support for the GOP nominees, not the Democrats. Kelly’s flush coffers have likely helped him tamp down his opponent more effectively than Hobbs, but it also doesn’t explain the whole story. 

Beyond 2020

Let’s return to the assumptions at the top that Lake and Masters are, at least on paper, very similar candidates. While it’s true that they both have repeated lies about the 2020 election and have been endorsed by Trump, they differ in a couple of crucial ways.

First is that Masters has backtracked from the 2020 election issue, scrubbing language from his website claiming that Trump would have won “if we had had a free and fair election.” At first glance, this dovier posture would seem to play to Masters’s benefit. After all, Biden did win Arizona in 2020 — albeit by less than 1 percentage point — and moderate candidates tend to perform better than more extreme ones. While we don’t know that Masters has suffered uniquely by taking this stance, we do know that GOP voters in Arizona aren’t exactly disqualifying candidates who take an extreme stance. For example, in the race for Arizona’s secretary of state, Republican candidate Mark Finchem has remained an extreme election denier (including spending most of a recent debate regurgitating baseless conspiracy theories) and yet led in a recent poll (though, notably, a full quarter of voters in that poll were undecided).

And Lake has actually been the less extreme candidate between the two when it comes to an issue more important to voters: abortion. Masters spent the primary advocating for a national “personhood law,” which typically means a full ban on abortions nationwide, and has supported a federal 15-week abortion ban bill introduced by Sen. Lindsey Graham. Since winning the primary, Masters has removed the “personhood” language from his website and said he supports a federal ban on third trimester abortions. Lake says she is pro-life, but her abortion platform focuses on support for people who are pregnant and access to birth control, not addressing abortion bans. When asked directly about bans, Lake has dodged the question. Toss in the fact that, after two decades on local TV as a newscaster, Lake enjoys a generous dollop of name recognition, and the puzzle pieces start to come together. 

We can also see something like this reflected in that AARP poll: Among Republicans, Lake is extremely popular, attracting 88 percent of likely GOP voters (Hobbs similarly has 94 percent support from Democrats), but Masters lags behind, drawing just 80 percent of likely Republican voters. Republican likely voters view Lake more favorably, too, at 80 percent favorability compared to Masters’s 71 percent. 

Whichever way you slice it, Masters is coming up short where Lake is prevailing, and it’s clear her more extreme election stances haven’t stopped her from strongly contending against her Democratic opponent. While candidates like Masters are easing away from the Trumpiest rhetoric after securing their nomination, Lake may yet prove that you can still win while embracing an extreme position. 

2022 Election

Do Democrats And Republicans Agree On Anything About Climate Change And Immigration?

By Holly Fuong and Geoffrey Skelley and Holly Fuong and Geoffrey Skelley

Graphics by Humera Lodhi

Sep. 29, 2022, at 6:00 AM

This article is part of our America's Issues series.

The last few weeks have been tumultuous for the issues of climate change and immigration. Record-setting summer temperatures, historic floods and devastating hurricanes have raised the stakes for the climate-change provisions contained within the Inflation Reduction Act. Meanwhile, Republican governors in Florida and Texas have attracted media attention for paying to transport migrants and asylum seekers to liberal areas of the country.

These two issues aren’t obviously linked, but they have one major commonality: They rank among the most partisan in the United States. Those on the left care a great deal about climate change, while those on the right are more likely to identify immigration and border security as an important issue.

In light of recent developments in both these areas, we decided to focus the fifth wave of our FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll on climate change and immigration. Using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, we’ve been asking the same group of about 2,000 Americans what they feel are the country’s most important issues. In our latest poll, “inflation or increasing costs,” “crime or gun violence” and “political extremism or polarization” continued to appear on Americans’ list of most important issues, as they’ve ranked among the top three in each wave of our survey since we began polling in late April. But climate change (20 percent) and immigration (19 percent) were next in our most recent wave, as the chart below shows.¹ 

Few issues had a wider partisan split than climate change or immigration. Overall, 36 percent of Democrats and just 5 percent of Republicans ranked climate change as a top issue facing the country. Conversely, 38 percent of Republicans and 6 percent of Democrats cited immigration as a top concern. This split has appeared consistently across all five waves: In each, 21 percent to 36 percent of Democrats have named climate change as a top issue, and 32 percent to 38 percent of Republicans have said the same of immigration.

When it comes to climate change, Americans are divided by party on more than simply its importance. When asked how much of climate change is caused by humans, 88 percent of Democrats and just 35 percent of Republicans said that it was “entirely” or “mostly” caused by humans, with independents between the two at 65 percent.² When asked whether the U.S. should pass regulations related to climate change that were “more strict,” “less strict” or “about as strict as they are today,” 76 percent of Democrats, 43 percent of independents and only 17 percent of Republicans wanted stricter regulations.³ 

And when asked to choose between two approaches to dealing with climate change, 89 percent of Democrats and 68 percent of independents supported prioritizing changes today that would reduce the effects of climate change before they happen, while 57 percent of Republicans preferred adjusting to climate change as it’s happening to minimize disruptions to daily life. Willie Yelverton, a 50-year-old Black man from Pennsylvania who identified as a Democrat, told us that even seemingly mundane changes would be important to reducing the impact of climate change. “[The government will] need to institute standard issue tax breaks for reusable materials,” he said. “There’ll have to be bans on goods that don’t have a path to be recycled and or reused going forward. Those are small line items, but it’s a very tough pill to swallow.”

However, we did find more agreement across party lines when it came to legislative action to address climate change. We asked Americans whether they supported three climate-change measures included in the Inflation Reduction Act, which became law last month (we asked this without referring to the Inflation Reduction Act by name). As the chart below indicates, Americans across the political spectrum were at least somewhat receptive to them.⁴

Overall, more than 60 percent backed each of the three proposals, which included an increased emphasis on developing and using alternative energy sources, increased government regulation on corporations’ carbon emissions and giving tax credits to corporations that reduce carbon emissions. This included a majority of Democrats, Republicans and independents, too, save for increasing government regulation of business’ carbon emissions — although a plurality of Republicans still backed this idea (47 percent). Despite decently strong support for these proposals, Americans were largely unfamiliar with the Inflation Reduction Act, with only 38 percent stating that they were “very” or “somewhat” familiar with it.⁵

We also found that, regardless of party, a respondent’s concern about climate change related to whether he or she had experienced unusual climate events. Republicans displayed a striking worry gap based on experience: Forty-six percent of those who had encountered extreme weather in the past five years said they were worried about climate change, compared with just 17 percent who hadn’t (a gap 8 percentage points larger than the one seen among Democrats, who already had a majority of respondents express worry about climate change independent of their experiences).⁶ A 61-year-old man from Florida who identified as a person of color and a Republican said he had recently experienced an extreme weather event, noting particular concern over “the obvious destruction of natural resources due to excessive heat, diminished water reserves and unusual number of heat domes impacting climate across multiple continents.”

With the media spotlight hovering over immigration, partisan divides toward immigration should also come as little surprise. When we asked if rules surrounding legal immigration should become “more strict,” “less strict” or “remain about the same,” a plurality of Republicans (43 percent) preferred stricter rules, while 36 percent preferred the status quo, and 12 percent backed looser regulations (the remainder didn’t know or skipped the question). By comparison, only 11 percent of Democrats favored more restrictive rules, with 73 percent split evenly between wanting things to remain about the same or become less strict. 

Meanwhile, Republicans were more unified on the issue of illegal immigration, as 78 percent said they wanted stricter rules toward those entering the country without proper authorization, compared to just 24 percent of Democrats who said the same. Michael Ritchie, a 27-year-old white man from Texas who identified as a conservative-libertarian independent, told us he wanted the government to incentivize legal immigration and disincentivize immigrants entering the country without legal permission. “I don't think there can ever be enough boots on the ground, per se, to completely secure the border,” he said. “But creating new policies or revamping immigration policies that would keep people from coming here simply for free rides or anything like that, but also make it easier for people to come here legally.”

That aligns with another finding in our poll: Among the 1 in 5 respondents who named immigration as a top issue facing the country, 95 percent said undocumented immigration was a bigger issue for the country, compared with just 1 percent who said legal immigration. “The federal government abandoned its duty to protect our borders. The flow of immigration outside the proper process is a symptom that anything can cross it without control,” said a 41-year-old Hispanic man from New York who identified as Republican.

And unlike the policy ideas to tackle climate change, Americans were more split on the best ways to address immigration concerns. When we asked whether respondents supported or opposed five immigration-related proposals, the only one that received majority support was the U.S. accepting more refugees from Ukraine.

But as we’ve seen in other polls, Americans view refugees differently based on where they’re from, as only 45 percent overall wanted to accept more refugees from Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Republicans were far and away most supportive of expanding the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico (80 percent) and further restricting the number of visas given out (62 percent), while solid majorities of Democrats opposed these ideas (75 percent and 60 percent, respectively). Outside of supporting an increase in Ukrainian refugees and opposing the building of a border wall between the U.S. and Canada, independents were split pretty evenly on these proposals. 

Of course, it’s not as if these issues stand apart from each other. A 24-year-old multiracial woman from California who identified as a Democrat said, “[Climate change] will have such a large impact on America’s future, yet it’s turned into a ‘political issue’ with so much disinformation being spread. People are refusing to make the changes necessary to reverse climate change because of politicians who tell them lies.” Others tied immigration to issues such as health care. “Illegal immigration is a burden on the health care, judicial, education, etc. systems in the U.S. Even legal immigration hurts the U.S. with overpopulation,” said a 63-year-old white man from New York who identified as a Republican.

And how these issues motivate or persuade voters to back one party or the other will be of vital importance when voters go to the polls in November. With fewer than six weeks until the midterms, 46 percent of respondents told us they were certain or almost certain to vote, up from 42 percent back in the first wave in the spring. And among those likely voters, Democrats and Republicans are about evenly split on the generic ballot, with 41 percent saying that they plan to vote for a Democrat and 40 percent planning to vote for a Republican (which is within the margin of error). Still, 17 percent of likely voters told us they intended to vote for a third-party option or didn't know how they planned to vote.

Based on their highly partisan nature in today’s political environment, climate change and immigration may not immediately jump out as issues that help undecided voters make up their minds. But we’ll get a firmer answer to this question next month, when we take a closer look at which issues voters are thinking about the most when they cast their ballots. 

Art direction by Dan Dao. Copy editing by Maya Sweedler. Story editing by Santul Nerkar.

2022 Election

Women Have Swung Toward Democrats Since The Dobbs Decision

Men have too.

By Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Meredith Conroy and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Meredith Conroy

Sep. 28, 2022, at 1:06 PM

With about a month before the midterm election, some Republican candidates across the country are scrambling to moderate their position on abortion. Supporting the recent Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — which overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the constitutional right to abortion — might be a winner in a Republican primary, but early signs are that it makes it harder to win a general election.

The conventional wisdom is that that’s in part because women are more motivated to vote this election season thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling. Conventional wisdom isn’t necessarily based on evidence, though. And while abortion is an increasingly important issue for women, there are signs it is galvanizing some men too.

If the Dobbs decision were motivating more women than men, then there’s a metric where that change would probably show up: the gender gap. The gender gap is calculated by looking at the difference between the share of men and women who voted for a particular candidate or party. A higher share of women than men have voted for Democrats in every midterm election since 1980, and in the past two midterm cycles the gap has been even bigger.

The 2018 midterm elections are a good example. That year, according to the exit polls, 59 percent of women — and only 47 percent of men — voted Democratic, which means the gender gap was historically wide, at nearly 12 percentage points.

It will be hard to exceed that gap, even with abortion at the forefront of many voters’ minds. Our analysis of polls conducted between June and September suggests that, yes, women are leaning heavily toward Democrats, while men are more likely to support Republicans. But in our polling average,¹ the gender gap isn’t quite as big as it was at this point in 2018.

Of course, the size of the gender gap will vary depending on the poll. We looked at two Pew Research Center polls — one conducted in August 2018 and one in August 2022 — and found that, in contrast with our average, the gender gap for Democrats among registered voters was a little wider in 2022 (6 points) than it was at the same point in 2018 (5 points), although it’s in the same ballpark. And it is noteworthy that Pew’s data says the 2022 gender gap is looking similar to the gap at the same point in 2018, given that Democrats have more electoral headwinds this year.

“I expect that the [Supreme Court] ruling will lead women — especially Gen-Z women — to be far more engaged with the midterms than they would have been otherwise,” said Melissa Deckman, the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonprofit polling organization. 

But the gender gap is a measure of one fairly specific thing: how women vote relative to men. And that can be complicated when it comes to abortion, because men and women overall have very similar views on the issue. As we’ve written before, whether someone supports or opposes abortion rights has much more to do with their view of gender roles than their own gender. It’s possible, for example, that if left-leaning men are also unusually motivated to turn out, the gender gap could be smaller. A similar dynamic happened in 2020, when men moved toward President Joe Biden, resulting in a smaller gender gap compared with 2016. 

So far, the evidence about how men are responding to the Dobbs ruling is mixed. Over the past few months, polls have found over and over again that rising concern over abortion is most dramatic among women, and reports of surging voter registration have focused on women. Kelly Dittmar, a political science professor at Rutgers University-Camden, said this makes sense because women — in particular, reproductive-aged women who support legal abortion — are more likely than men to feel personally threatened by the sudden loss of abortion rights.

But there have also been reports of higher-than-usual voter registration among young men. An analysis of a series of polls by the nonpartisan firm PerryUndem,² shared with FiveThirtyEight, before and after the Dobbs ruling found that men of reproductive age were more likely to prioritize “safe and legal abortion” as a voting issue. In our polling average,³ we found that the gender gap for both Democrats and Republicans grew from June through September, but the gap grew more for Republicans than for Democrats. The two gaps are lopsided because men’s share of support for Democrats has grown as well as women’s, which means that the full magnitude of the shift doesn’t show up in that party’s side. Meanwhile, the shift in the Republicans’ gender gap shows something different: While the share of men supporting Republicans hasn’t changed meaningfully since June, the share of women supporting Republicans has declined, causing the gap to increase.

Daniel Cassino, a professor of government and politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University, said that abortion-rights opponents might also be fired up by the Dobbs decision — but that’s less likely to show up as a change in the polls because those people are a solid part of the Republican base and more likely to vote in midterm elections to begin with. “This year, motivating those [anti-abortion voters] doesn’t really help Republicans, because they’re already motivated,” he said.

He explained that reports of higher-than-usual voter registration among women and young voters are another complicating factor because it’s hard for pollsters to account for unexpected surges in turnout. Young voters tend to have particularly low turnout, and pollsters sometimes rely on how demographic groups have behaved in the past when they create models to determine who’s likely to vote and who isn’t. If young women are unusually motivated to vote this year, that could throw off pollsters’ estimates.

And then there are all the other factors that influence how people vote. Inflation and the economy are other issues that still consistently show up at the top of voters’ priority lists, and that’s not good for Democrats. Even though the economic outlook has improved in some respects over the past few months, a recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College poll found that only 26 percent of Americans said that Democrats would do a better job handling the economy, while 39 percent said Republicans would do a better job. (An additional 20 percent said that neither party would do a better job, and 12 percent said they’d do an equally good job.) 

So the question isn’t just whether abortion is motivating women more than men — it’s whether concern about abortion will lead voters who might be skeptical about the Democratic Party to vote for its candidates anyway. That group includes men as well as women, and their decisions will do a lot to shape how wide or narrow the gender gap turns out to be.

Mary Radcliffe and Cooper Burton contributed research.

Georgia’s closely watched races for governor and Senate have put the state back in the spotlight this year. In Part 2 of this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, politics reporter Alex Samuels and visual journalist Elena Mejía break down their reporting on how Black voters are changing the state’s political landscape.

2022 Election

Progressives Took A Step Back In The 2022 Primaries — But They’re Playing The Long Game

By Meredith Conroy and Nathaniel Rakich and Meredith Conroy and Nathaniel Rakich

Sep. 27, 2022, at 1:30 PM

When Rep. Kurt Schrader, a seven-term incumbent endorsed by President Biden, lost his primary in May, he joined a small but slowly growing list of congressional veterans defeated by progressive candidates with the backing of an increasingly influential campaign apparatus on the left.

This renewed progressive movement emerged following Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential primary run, yet despite some high-profile wins in 2018, its candidates lost more often than they won due to a scattershot strategy. Then, in 2020, when progressives got more targeted with their electoral strategy, their win rate increased. But in 2022, the progressive movement appears to have taken a small step back.

FiveThirtyEight tracked every endorsement made by a major progressive group for Senate, House and governor this primary season. We consider a candidate “progressive-backed” if they were endorsed by Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or any of the following groups: Indivisible, Justice Democrats, Our Revolution, the Sunrise Movement or the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.¹ We also looked at candidates backed by various groups and leaders representing the more moderate or establishment wing of the Democratic Party and found that, overall, the Democratic establishment has an edge in the battle for the party’s soul. 

Incumbents largely staved off progressive challengers

Eleven candidates endorsed by at least one of those progressive organizations or people went into the 2022 election cycle hoping to topple an incumbent.² Only one of them won: Schrader’s opponent, attorney Jamie McLeod-Skinner. By contrast, in 2020, progressives won three out of 17 such battles.

Of these races, one of the most closely watched was in Texas’s 28th Congressional District, where progressive attorney Jessica Cisneros took on Rep. Henry Cuellar for the second time. Cuellar is a long-time moderate in the party and an opponent of abortion rights. In 2020 Cisneros came within 4 percentage points of unseating him. Cisneros and her supporters were looking to replicate the success of Rep. Marie Newman, who defeated eight-term Democratic Rep. Dan Lipinski in 2020 after she lost to him by 2 points in 2018. (Lipinski also opposed abortion rights.) But despite all seven progressive entities we tracked being in her corner, Cisneros came up short: After forcing a runoff, she lost to Cuellar by only 289 votes. (Newman is out this cycle too. She lost to fellow incumbent Rep. Sean Casten.)

Incumbents’ myriad advantages help them win primaries most of the time. For one, they (usually) have the support of party leadership. For instance, in the race between Cisneros and Cuellar, Cuellar was endorsed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn and House Democratic Caucus Chair Hakeem Jeffries. And while Biden does not typically issue primary endorsements as his predecessor did, the president made three exceptions for House candidates this cycle, all for incumbents facing progressive primary challengers: Schrader and Reps. Shontel Brown and Danny Davis. Schrader lost, but both Brown and Davis prevailed.

Races like these that pit a progressive against an establishment Democrat are watched closely as referenda on the future direction of the party. And among more moderate Democrats, progressive losses are seized upon to suggest that the party’s base is still pro-establishment — or at least satisfied with the status quo. For instance, Jeffries, a known critic of the progressives in his party, was asked in August if he thought the progressive movement had stopped gaining ground. He responded, “Politically, the left did have some success in primarying Democratic incumbents in 2018, and 2020 … But a lot of their electoral momentum began to dissipate shortly after Biden was elected … Perhaps the voters are sending us a message.”

Progressives had more luck in open-seat races

Jeffries’s analysis ignores that progressive-backed candidates do much better in primaries without an incumbent on the ballot. For example, in 2022, the progressive-backed candidate won 14 out of the 25 open-seat primaries in which they ran — good for a 56 percent win rate.

And some of these were pretty big wins. For instance, after Rep. Mike Doyle announced his intention not to run for reelection in Pennsylvania’s safely Democratic 12th Congressional District, most progressive groups lined up behind state Rep. Summer Lee. As a result, Lee edged out Doyle’s chosen successor by less than 1 point. Likewise, in Wisconsin’s U.S. Senate race, progressive-backed Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes was such a formidable candidate that his closest rivals could not gain traction and dropped out one by one. That eventually led to his primary coronation (though it remains to be seen whether he will win the general election in November).

However, progressives also won fewer of these primaries than they did in 2020. That year, their win rate in incumbent-less primaries was a robust 69 percent (22 wins in 32 tries). Part of the decline could be because of the emergence of a well-funded opposition mobilizing against them. For example, progressives endorsed two congressional candidates in North Carolina, former state Sen. Erica Smith and Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam, who failed to win their primaries. In both those elections, the same foe stepped up to block them: the United Democracy Project, a pro-Israel super PAC funded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The United Democracy Project spent nearly $24.3 million this election cycle helping to elect moderate Democrats over progressives, with their biggest outlay coming on behalf of former Prince George’s County State’s Attorney Glenn Ivey over former Rep. Donna Edwards in Maryland’s 4th Congressional District.³ The super PAC’s efforts were not always successful — it also spent heavily against Lee, for example — but it did win more races it got involved in than progressives did: seven out of nine, or 78 percent. 

Similarly, progressives’ win rate was far lower than the win rate of candidates supported by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the official House campaign arm of the Democratic Party. All 18 candidates who were put on the DCCC’s “Red to Blue” list before their primaries advanced to the general election.⁴

Notably, the party went head-to-head against progressives only once: in New York’s 11th Congressional District, where former Rep. Max Rose defeated Army veteran Brittany Ramos DeBarros. Ramos DeBarros was endorsed by Indivisible, Our Revolution and the PCCC. In fact, 13 of the DCCC’s Red to Blue candidates faced no Democratic opposition in their primaries. This is a good reminder that progressive and establishment candidates aren’t necessarily in opposition. 

Different progressive groups have different strategies

It’s also important to remember that not all progressive groups are the same. Some groups and leaders still see the value in endorsing a longer-shot candidate with little chance of winning to influence agenda-setting or remind more establishment candidates that their party’s tent is big. Others, by contrast, are more strategic, hoping to funnel their resources into the races they feel they have the best chance of winning. As a result, certain progressive endorsers have better records than others. 

For instance, Justice Democrats have a 100 percent win rate in incumbent-less primaries (three for three), up from 67 percent in 2020 (two for three) and a marked improvement from 2018 (32 percent), when they endorsed more broadly (50 candidates). As we wrote in 2020, of all the progressive groups emerging since 2016, Justice Democrats, in particular, seem most targeted in their recruitment efforts and deliberate about their endorsements, which helps explain their success. Ocasio-Cortez (three for four) and the Sunrise Movement (three for five) also succeeded with limited endorsement strategies.

Of the progressives who were a bit freer with their endorsements, Sanders did the best with an 80 percent win rate in incumbent-less primaries (eight for 10), up from 75 percent in 2020 (six for eight) and 56 percent in 2018 (five for nine). This could reflect Sanders’s status as the godfather of the party’s progressive wing, but given the growth in his own win rate, it could be the product of a shrewder endorsement strategy. Finally, the PCCC was the only progressive endorser we looked at with a losing record (36 percent, or four for 11).

The 2022 primaries continued to display all the factors working against progressives — factors that have kept the soul of the Democratic Party fairly establishment-friendly. But it’s also important to remember that progressives are playing the long game. They may not have won as often as their opponents. Still, many did win their primaries and will join a growing number already on the inside. It may not be a sudden transformation, but progressives are slowly gaining strength within the Democratic Party with every passing election cycle.

A president’s approval rating is traditionally tied to how his party performs in a midterm election, but Democrats have been outpacing President Biden in the polls for months. In Part 1 of this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses how Biden’s approval rating may impact the midterm election and how the Democrats’ performance in November could influence the president’s 2024 reelection plans.

The team also debates whether tracking Google search terms over time is a better barometer than traditional polling when it comes to understanding the issues shaping American voting patterns.

FiveThirtyEight Podcasts

Come To Our Politics Podcast Live Show!

By Chadwick Matlin

Sep. 27, 2022, at 11:55 AM

After a couple of years stuck inside our makeshift home studios, the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is finally going back on the road. We’ll be in Washington, D.C., for a live show on Tuesday, Oct. 25. Nate Silver will be there! Galen Druke will be there! Nathaniel Rakich will be there! Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux will be there! Will you be there?

Topics will include the latest odds for Democrats and Republicans headed into the midterms, how the current political environment has upended expectations, why this year’s election could be historic and much more. 

The live podcast show will take place at Sixth & I at 7 p.m. Eastern. In-person and virtual tickets are available. For tickets and more information, check out Sixth & I’s events page. Hope to see you at there!

A president’s approval rating is traditionally tied to how his party performs in a midterm election, but Democrats have been outpacing President Biden in the polls for months. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses how Biden’s approval rating may impact the midterm election and how the Democrats’ performance in November could influence the president’s 2024 reelection plans.

The team also debates whether tracking Google search terms over time is a better barometer than traditional polling when it comes to understanding the issues shaping American voting patterns. Lastly, politics reporter Alex Samuels and visual journalist Elena Mejía break down their reporting on how Black voters are changing the political landscape of Georgia.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

What effect is social media having on our politics and, for that matter, society more broadly? According to critics, we’re living through an unregulated era of social media that will one day look as quaint as tobacco in its pre-regulation era.

In his new book, “The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World” New York Times reporter Max Fisher explores how social media impacts the psychology of its users and changes how people think, behave and communicate. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen Druke talks to Fisher about his book and why he believes this is leading to social and political crises in the U.S. and around the world.

2022 Election

How Black Americans Reshaped Politics In Georgia

By Elena Mejía and Alex Samuels and Elena Mejía and Alex Samuels

Sep. 26, 2022, at 6:00 AM

In the 2020 election cycle, Democrats’ decades-long dream of winning Georgia finally became a reality. The state voted for a Democrat, Joe Biden, in the presidential race for the first time since 1992, and it elected two Democrats to the U.S. Senate.

Looking back, it’s hard to pinpoint what turned Georgia blue. Was it antipathy toward then-President Donald Trump? After all, anti-Trump sentiment among Democrats was particularly high in 2018 and 2020. Then again, the wheels for a Democratic takeover were already set in motion when the party’s gubernatorial nominee, Stacey Abrams, pioneered a new playbook focused on Black voters in 2018, something that nearly won her the governorship that year and motivated more Georgians to vote blue in 2020 and 2021.

In fact, a lot of what happened in 2020 can be credited to Black voters. In the prior two decades, Georgia slowly tilted toward Democrats, in large part because of an influx of Black Americans moving back to the South since the 1970s, a reversal of the Great Migration that started in the 1910s. This trend has been particularly pronounced in Georgia. More than any other state, it has seen the biggest increase in its share of Black¹ Americans 18 years or older.

In other words, new Black voters in the state — and their participation in recent elections — have helped the Peach State make history, and a continuation of that trend could significantly shift the balance of power toward Democrats in competitive statewide races there this year.

“Not only do you have a higher percentage of Black people coming in, but they are geographically dispersed. And they’re largely voting for Democrats. So, from a political perspective, the map is changing every day. I wouldn’t necessarily call Georgia a blue state, but it certainly is purple, and it can go blue during any given election,” said Andre Perry, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

According to FiveThirtyEight’s 2022 election forecast,² the Senate race is a toss-up, while the governor’s race is more squarely in Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s column. Still, though, in a state that has changed so much in the past 20-odd years, a lot may come down to how many — and if — Black voting-age Georgians cast their ballots.

Notably, both parties have made an intentional effort to reach Black voters this year. Abrams’s campaign, for instance, has hosted conversations called “Stacey and the Fellas” to engage Black men in the state. And in an August campaign event, she bluntly explained why: “If Black men vote for me, I’ll win Georgia.” But Spencer Crew, a professor of history at George Mason University, told us it’s clear that Republicans are also trying to appeal to Black voters. For example, prominent Republicans’ decision to back former NFL star Herschel Walker, a Black man, to challenge Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, also a Black man, is “a recognition from the party that Black voters are important and that they’re trying to figure out ways to tap into that electorate.” It’s possible there will be an opening for Republicans, too, as Black voters have soured on Biden and a renowned celebrity like Walker could be serious competition.

But either party’s success will likely hinge on how they perform in Georgia’s capital city, Atlanta. 

Case in point: In 2020, the counties in Atlanta’s metro areas³ that saw the biggest increases in the number of Black Americans casting their ballots also saw some of the strongest shifts toward Biden and were key to helping him win. About 32 percent — or over 136,000 — more Black voters showed up in 2020 than in 2016, when Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was on the ballot.

These shifts have been a long time coming. Since 2000, the growth in Atlanta’s Black voting-age population has been close to four times as fast as the growth of its white⁴ voting-age population. Moreover, the city’s surrounding metro area has been a center of Black voting-age population growth in the U.S., with close to 700,000 more Black Americans 18 years old or over calling the Atlanta area home since 2000. Put another way, this 6-percentage-point increase in the area’s Black voting-age population has been a pivotal factor in its politics.

“For the Black community, Atlanta is clearly an attractive place in the South to go live. And clearly that’s impacting the political environment in and around the city as well and the surrounding suburbs,” Crew said. The election of two Democratic senators following a very close race for governor “shows that the state’s demographics are changing and the organizing of Black voters is shifting the balance of power.”

Cobb and Gwinnett counties, the Atlanta area’s most-populated urban counties⁵ after Fulton, have grown by over 200,000 Black Americans of voting age in 20 years. In 2000, the two counties were heavily Republican and had an average vote-share margin of R+27 in that presidential election. But by 2020, the average vote share had swung 16 points toward Democrats.

To be sure, it wasn’t until Trump ran for president in 2016 that Cobb, Gwinnett and Henry, one of Atlanta’s largest suburbs, flipped blue, even though the Black electorate had already been changing. And some counties, like Fulton, haven’t seen sharp increases in Black voters but have still moved to the left.

It’s true that racial demographics alone cannot tell us everything about Georgia’s political landscape. Educational attainment has also been a driving factor. It all comes down to whether these factors are reflected in who turns out. We can see this in the suburbs, which were simply vital for Biden in 2020, when he won Georgia by close to 12,000 votes. As the chart below shows, Democrats’ biggest suburban gains in vote margin from 2016 happened in counties where Black voters turned out in high numbers, underscoring the importance of Black suburban voters.

The reversal of the Great Migration in recent decades has been propelled largely by young, college-educated Black Americans, whose votes were key to Biden’s winning Atlanta, which was in turn important to his success in the state overall: 60 percent of Georgia’s electorate came from the capital city’s metro area.

“Those middle-income Black people who truly fit the profile of the ‘suburban mom or dad’ like to see leaders who look like them,” said Perry, of Brookings. “So they’re electing Black people in the counties and municipalities they’re moving into. So there is also a power shift that’s going on at the local level that can bubble up to affect statewide races.”

There’s no question, then, that Black voters have transformed Georgia’s electorate and put it at the forefront of southern Black political might. This is especially true in the state’s suburbs, which have gotten really competitive. Most suburbs in Atlanta have shifted toward Democrats by 31 points or so in 20 years and have gained, on average, more than 315,000 voting-age Black Americans, far outpacing the growth of the white voting-age population by 200,000.

“White voters are leaving the suburbs, and Black Americans are moving into the state’s cities and suburbs,” said William Frey, a demographer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “And you’re seeing that big time in Atlanta, which is essentially a prototype of what the Black population can do in terms of changing not only the demography but also the political demography of different parts of the state.”

Frey told FiveThirtyEight that the white population has declined since 2016, especially in the Atlanta metropolitan area. Henry County, for example, lost nearly 13,500 white people while gaining more than 30,000 Black people between 2016 and 2021. “There are several counties that have had absolute declines of their white population and gains of [their] Black one, like Gwinnett and Cobb counties,” he said. This, according to Frey, suggests a significant share of the state’s white voters are moving out of the suburbs and urban areas and into more rural parts of the state.

Keneshia Grant, a professor of political science at Howard University, went one step further describing what may happen if the rate of Black people moving into Atlanta remains high, saying there could be “a tipping point at which the number of people living in these metropolitan areas or metropolitan-adjacent areas will be high enough to overcome the rural areas.”

Consider what happened in Georgia in the last presidential and Senate elections, particularly Warnock’s defeat of Republican Kelly Loeffler in the Senate runoffs. His win was due, in part, to almost every single suburb in the state shifting further to the left from the November 2020 presidential election, with nearly 92 percent of November’s Black voters turning out again in January 2021 for the runoffs, but Warnock also benefited from more Republican-heavy parts of the state not turning out to vote. Both he and Jon Ossoff, the other Democrat who won in the Senate runoffs, improved on Biden’s margins, especially in counties with the largest share of Black voters.

Per the FiveThirtyEight forecast, most U.S. House races in the Peach State aren’t that competitive this year. But, once again, the suburbs are likely to be important for both parties as they fight for control of the U.S. Senate.

According to Perry, there’s a good chance that having multiple Black candidates on the ticket will energize voters in ways they weren’t previously. Abrams’s close election in 2018, he added, also might encourage Black Democrats to go out and vote, even in a midterm year. Nationally, turnout among Black voters is typically lower than that of voters overall in both midterm and general elections. But it’s possible Georgia may see higher turnout this year, as the state saw an uptick in early voting in the May primaries. That said, it’s still too early to know how the restrictive voting law Georgia recently passed will affect turnout in November.

But don’t miss the forest for the trees. That higher early-voting turnout in the Georgia primaries was among both Democrats and Republicans. At this point, it doesn’t seem as if Republicans have made inroads with Black voters in the state, as a Sept. 8-12 poll from Quinnipiac University found that Black likely voters overwhelmingly support Abrams (91 percent) and Warnock (92 percent) over their GOP opponents. But the overall toplines show just how competitive these statewide races are: The gubernatorial race showed Abrams behind Kemp by just 2 points, while the Senate matchup had Warnock leading Walker 52 percent to 46 percent.

In other words, greater turnout among Black voters won’t guarantee Democratic victories up and down the ballot, as a lot of other factors are at play in Georgia. But as Perry told FiveThirtyEight, recent Democratic victories in the state have also energized Black voters. “Once you start getting a few people elected and get some statewide wins under your belt, then you start believing that you belong and that those seats are yours,” Perry said. “There is a palpable empowerment that Black people are feeling in Georgia like they’ve never felt before.”

The Deluxe version of the FiveThirtyEight midterm forecast just shifted slightly, but it’s not because of anything that happened in politics. Rather, it’s because we identified — and fixed — an error related to missing data that was leading to incorrect odds for several Senate, House and gubernatorial races. We wanted to take some time to explain what happened, how we identified it and the effect the correction had.

On Thursday, Sabato’s Crystal Ball — one of three election forecasters whose race ratings factor into the Deluxe version of the FiveThirtyEight midterm forecast — moved the Ohio 9th Congressional District from “toss-up” to “leans Democratic.” When we went to input this change into our forecast, though, we found that our spreadsheet of race ratings was missing any Crystal Ball rating for the Ohio 9th whatsoever. 

Upon closer inspection, we discovered we were actually missing Crystal Ball ratings for dozens of races. We used to have this data, but a look back at old files shows it was accidentally deleted on June 30.¹ (Ratings from the other expert race raters, Inside Elections and the Cook Political Report, were unaffected.) 

On Friday, we re-collected the Crystal Ball ratings data and added it back into the model — and the Deluxe version of the forecast has changed slightly as a result. (The Lite and Classic versions of the forecast, which don’t incorporate expert race ratings, remain unchanged.) Democrats’ overall odds of winning the House increased by 0.7 percentage points to 70-in-100, but their odds of winning the Senate decreased by 0.5 points to 32-in-100. More importantly, though, some individual races did shift significantly. Here’s every race whose odds changed by at least 1 percentage point.

We know how much readers rely on our forecast to be as accurate as possible, and we’re aware that, for some people — politicians, campaign staffers and voters alike — the forecast represents something more than just a number on a page. So we’re taking steps to ensure this error doesn’t recur. We usually use an automated process to collect and update race ratings, but we’ve turned that off so that we can manually check all future ratings changes from all three election forecasters. And while we’re still unsure how the data got deleted, we are actively investigating to ensure we patch up any systematic problems in our workflow. We hope you’ll continue to use and trust our forecast.

Election Update

The Polls Still Do Not Show A GOP Bounce Back

By Nate Silver

Sep. 23, 2022, at 1:49 PM

Ever since we launched our election model in late June, it has moved entirely in one direction: toward Democrats. Pretty much every week, they’ve either gained ground in our forecast or held steady. 

This week has been more in the “held steady” category. In the Deluxe version of our model, Democrats’ chances of keeping the Senate are 71 percent, while their chances of holding the House are 31 percent. Neither number has meaningfully changed from a week ago.

As Democrats’ position has continually improved, I’ve tended to focus on optimistic scenarios for Democrats. Frankly, I’ve been looking for an opportunity to reiterate why Republicans could still have a pretty good midterm. They are, after all, reasonably clear favorites to flip the House, and a 30 percent chance to flip the Senate is nothing to sneeze at, either. That 30 percent chance is pretty much the same one our model gave to Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton on Election Day in 2016.

But that Republicans could win doesn’t mean that their situation is improving. I’ve seen several recent claims about Republican momentum in the polls that I don’t think are yet justified in the evidence.

Let’s leave our probabilistic forecast aside for now and just look at the polls themselves. Specifically, we’ll look at what our polling averages say as I write this on Sept. 22 and how that compares to one month ago, on Aug. 22. A fair amount has happened since then: The White House announced its student loan forgiveness program on Aug. 24; there’s been some fairly negative inflation news and other economic data; Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sent around 50 migrants to Martha’s Vineyard; Russia is facing significant setbacks in its war with Ukraine; and campaigns are kicking into higher gear in many states after Labor Day.

First up, the generic Congressional ballot. Democrats currently lead by 1.9 percentage points in our average. That reflects continued improvement from Aug. 22, when they led by 0.4 percentage points.

Our generic ballot average, however, is designed to be somewhat slow-moving – so if there’s been a recent reversal in the improving electoral environment for Democrats, it may be slow to detect it. Our presidential approval average is more aggressive, by contrast. As of Sept. 22 at 5 p.m. Eastern, Biden has a 42.5 percent approval rating and a 53.0 percent disapproval rating. That’s mediocre, although similar to where several other presidents have been in advance of their first midterm.

Nonetheless, those numbers are improved from Aug. 22, when Biden had a 40.9 approval rating against 54.3 percent disapproval.

What about individual Senate and gubernatorial races? FiveThirtyEight publishes polling averages in these races once there are a sufficient number of polls. Technically speaking, these polling averages are calculated separately from the version used by our forecast model, which performs various fancy adjustments to the polls (for instance, our model adjusts outdated polls based on changes in the generic ballot). 

For the purposes of this article’s exercise, though, the comparative simplicity of our standalone polling averages should work well. So let’s look at all races where there have been a) at least two polls between the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade on June 24¹ and Aug. 22, and b) at least two polls between Aug. 22 and now. In these states, we have enough data to establish a post-Dobbs baseline and to see whether there’s been a meaningful shift. Eleven Senate races meet this criteria²; here is how the polling average has changed in each one:

If you squint, you can see some movement toward Republicans. On Aug. 22, Democrats led by 4.7 percentage points in these races on average, and now they lead by 3.8 percentage points.

But few individual races have moved all that much. Republicans have gained at least a full percentage point in Florida, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin, while Democrats have done so in New Hampshire.

Interestingly enough, this movement has often been in line with what the “fundamentals” in each race might have predicted. Most expert groups had rated races such as Wisconsin and Nevada as tossups, even though polls had shown Democrats ahead there. So this may just be reversion to the mean, given that neither race had been polled terribly often, rather than any actual shift in voter sentiment.

Finally, a look at gubernatorial races, using the same parameters as we did for the Senate races:

These don’t show any shift toward Republicans. On average, Democrats led by 1.4 percentage points on Aug. 22, and they lead by 1.9 percentage points now. Some individual races have changed, of course, but these moves have been in either direction. Democrats have gained at least a percentage point in Florida, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin, while Republicans have done so in Arizona, Michigan, Massachusetts and New York.

We could go race by race and debate which of these shifts are “real” and which reflect noisy or low-quality polling. But that’s beside the point, which is that there hasn’t been any systematic rebound by Republicans. In the 24 gubernatorial and Senate races listed here, Democrats led by an average of 2.9 percentage points on Aug. 22, and they lead by 2.8 percentage points now. There’s been essentially no change, in other words.

Of course, that may not be true in the future. It may be too soon to see the impact of recent news stories in the polls. I tend to think DeSantis’s stunt in sending migrants to Massachusetts will engender more of a reaction on cable news and on Twitter than it will necessarily matter to normal swing voters. But a sustained focus on immigration could be worse for Democrats than one on other issues such as abortion. And as I wrote last week, our model does expect the political environment to get slightly better for Republicans between now and November.

Mostly, though, we’ve reached that part of the election cycle where you ought to be wary of media narratives about which party has “momentum.” There are a lot of competitive elections this cycle, and since Labor Day, we’ve started to see a lot more polling. It’s very, very easy to cherry-pick your way into a story that fits your preconceived notions about the race. But when there’s a major, nationwide shift in the race — as there was toward Democrats after the Dobbs decision — you usually don’t have to squint to see it.

North Carolina has become a haven for women in states throughout the South seeking abortion. According to Planned Parenthood, around a third of women getting abortions in North Carolina in July came from out of state, significantly higher than the 14 percent who sought abortions in June, when Roe v. Wade was overturned. This November, Republicans are looking to flip a few key seats in the state legislature to gain a supermajority and pass an abortion ban that would withstand a veto from Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper.

Transcript

Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux: Right now, abortion is legal in North Carolina until 20 weeks of pregnancy. But it won’t stay that way for long if Republicans in the state legislature are able to win enough seats in the upcoming midterm elections.

Senate leader Phil Berger said recently that he would support a ban on abortion after the first trimester of pregnancy. And House Speaker Tim Moore supports a ban on abortion after fetal cardiac activity is first detected, which usually happens around six weeks into a pregnancy.

But while Republicans have a majority in the North Carolina legislature, they don’t have the supermajority they would need to override a veto from Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper. That means the kind of abortion legislation that can be enacted in the 2023 legislative session hinges on whether they’re are able to pick up a handful of seats.

Republicans need to flip two seats in the Senate and three seats in the House to reach that coveted supermajority — and, of course, also hold onto all of their current seats. There are about a dozen races, mostly in Republican-leaning districts, that are pretty competitive. So, not an easy task but not an impossible one either.

A more extreme abortion ban wouldn’t just have an impact on North Carolinians. Many of the states surrounding North Carolina already have strict abortion bans. According to Planned Parenthood, in July, more than a third of patients accessing abortion care at its North Carolina clinics came from out of state. Roe was overturned in late June — and in that month, the share of out of state patients was just 14 percent. There aren’t many states left in the South where abortion is legal at all. So if it’s restricted in North Carolina too, Southerners who want abortions could have to travel even further to get one.

The majority of North Carolinians don’t want more restrictions than they already have. A poll of registered voters in North Carolina conducted in early August found that 55 percent thought the current laws are about right or wanted even fewer restrictions, while only 37 percent wanted more restrictions.

But will that stop Republicans from winning a supermajority in the legislature? Well … that’s harder to say. State legislative races are much less high-profile than elections for Congress or governor. Voters might simply not realize how much is riding on the outcome of a few tightly contested elections.

What effect is social media having on our politics and, for that matter, society more broadly? According to critics, we’re living through an unregulated era of social media that will one day look as quaint as tobacco in its pre-regulation era.

In his new book, “The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World” New York Times reporter Max Fisher explores how social media impacts the psychology of its users and changes how people think, behave and communicate.

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen Druke talks to Fisher about his book and why he believes this is leading to social and political crises in the U.S. and around the world.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.