Dear listeners,
We’re back and we have a guest this week: Nate Silver of Silver Bulletin. Nate joins us for the full episode.
We start with shutdown recriminations: I think Democrats had unreasonable expectations for what they could get out of a shutdown and, as I wrote for The New York Times, the much-maligned Chuck Schumer got them the best outcome that was available to them. But Ben and Nate think Democrats left value on the table, while Megan thinks a strong leader would have stopped his party from shutting down the government to begin with.
We also take a look at the polling: Donald Trump’s poll numbers have materially deteriorated in the last month, and we talk about possible reasons why (including that maybe the shutdown really did work for Democrats). We also talk about how Democrats way outran their polls in elections last week, in Virginia and especially in New Jersey. We ask Nate why, and we discuss whether that also means the national polls may be understating Democrats’ national strength.
We get Nate’s take on the strange debate over whether moderate candidates win more elections — in a world where we can see that Susan Collins and Jared Golden keep winning elections — and, relatedly, on whether G. Elliott Morris or Allan Lichtman is the better elections analyst.
We look at yet another pro-sports betting scandal — this time in baseball — with athletes accused of intentionally playing badly so their confederates could intentionally win proposition bets on how badly they, individually, would perform. We talk about whether gambling is undermining sports as a civic institution, and whether legalization was a mistake.
And finally, we talk about the closure of Teen Vogue (yes, they were publishing Teen Vogue) and the employee protests and employee firings that served as a somewhat pathetic last gasp of web media publishing culture circa 2017.
We hope you enjoy the show! Let us know what you think in the comments below.
Best,
Josh
